735 BYRO N. BYRON (George Gordon), afterwards George Gordon Noel, lord Byron, a late British peer and distinguished poet, was born in Holles Street, London, January 22d, 1788. His father was captain John Byron, of the guards, eldest son of admiral Byron, of whose history we have given a slight sketch; and his mother, a Miss Gordon of Gight, in Scotland, descended according to Mr. Dallas, from the princess Jane Stuart, a daughter of James II., of Scotland, who married the marquis of Huntley. The peerage was given to the family by Charles I. Lord Byron's immediate predecessor in the title was his father's uncle, William, lord Byron, who after a fatal duel with a relation and neighbour, Mr. Chaworth, felt the public opinion to be so much against his conduct, that he secluded himself at Newstead Abbey from all society, for many years previous to his death. The late lord Byron, who was somewhat prone to similar partialities, told captain Medwin that his uncle devoted himself at this period to the feeding of crickets. He had made them so tame as to crawl over him, and used to whip them with a whisp of straw if too familiar. When he died, tradition says that they left the house in a body. I suppose I derive my superstition (added his lordship), from this branch of the family.' Lord Byron's father was also too remarkable for his eccentricities and dissipation for us to be chargeable with any indelicacy in alluding to them, or for a fair estimate of his lordship's character to be given without taking them into the account, He was notorious in the circles of fashion as the 'mad Jack Byron', of handsome person, but of so abandoned a character, that to be known as his companion, was an exclusion from decent society. At the age of twenty-six he seduced lady Carmarthen, whom, after her divorce from the marquis, he married, having issue one daughter, Mrs. Leigh: he afterwards eloped with Miss Gordon, and, having nearly dissipated her fortune, separated from her, and died at Valenciennes in 1791. Mrs. Byron had, a short time Defore this event, retired to Mar Lodge, near Aberdeen, with her infant, the subject of our memoir. Here she personally conducted his education until he was seven years of age; and the wild scenery of Morven, of Loch-na-Garr, and of the banks of the Dee, became, as he afterwards opined, the parents of his poetical vein.' He is said to have remembered the later broils of his father and mother; and to have imbibed an early horror of matrimony from that circumstance. Be this as it may, he became certainly worse than fatherless, at an early age; his passions and affections were not only, as a poetical divine phrases it, his first governors,' and 'clearly possessed themselves of his soul before his reason was heard to speak,'-but an indulgent mother was their only director: and with a constitution not robust, and a malformation of one of his feet, he had peculiar claims on her solicitude. So that if generally (as the good bishop says), reason 6 speaks at first so little and so low, that the common noises of faucy and company drown her voice,'-we cannot suppose this voice to have been much heard in lord Byron's youth and childhood. If the honors of his birth afterwards increased his attractions as a poet, he clearly owed but little to it as a man. In his eighth year he was placed at the grammar school of Aberdeen; and, though little distinguished for constant application, was found capable of considerable efforts of mind. He was still more famous for the love of hardy exercises, than for either; and was indulged with frequent vacations, which he spent in the Highlands, on account of his health. On the whole, he says, he imbibed, at this time, an affection for Scotland, which Scottish Reviewers might afterwards shake, but did not destroy. In 1798 he succeeded, on the death of his great-uncle, to the title and estates of the family, and was immediately removed, under the guardianship of lord Carlisle, brother-in-law of the late lord Byron, to Harrow. Here he confesses that he ill-brooked the discipline, he could not but approve; and while he imbibed a lasting sense of the head master, Dr. Drury's, kindness (which he commemorates in his Hours of Idleness), he submitted with great reluctance to the ordinary discipline of the school. His vacations were at this time spent at Newstead, where, in his thirteenth year he became enamoured of Miss Chaworth, the only daughter and heiress of the gentleman who fell by the hand of his predecessor. The future properties of the youthful pair adjoined; and their meetings, though stolen ones, were frequent. The lady being his senior by some years, the affair soon terminated by her hand being bestowed on a more mature lover; but the disappointment was always described by lord Byron as serious to himself. At Harrow, the duke of Dorset was his fag, and 'I was not,' says he, 'a very hard task master. There were times in which if I had not considered it as a school, I should not have been unhappy at Harrow. There is one spot I should like to see again: I was particularly delighted with the view from the church yard, and used to sit for hours on the stile leading into the fields; even then I formed a wish to be buried there. Of all my schoolfellows, I know no one for whom I have retained so much friendship as for lord Clare; I have been constantly corresponding with him ever since. I knew he was in Italy, and look forward to seeing him, and talking over with him our old Harrow stories, with infinite delight.' Such was one of his communications to captain Medwin respecting his early life: and we may here observe, that while that gentleman's Journal of Conversations with lord Byron has not our absolute credence in all particulars; whatever we find elsewhere confirmed or rendered probable by other accounts, we adoptand many of the observations he records could not be otherwise than lord Byron's. He related, sentment toward the objects of his attack in the English Bards and Scotch Reviewers as to be fully prepared to withdraw that poem from circulation. It is singular that the principal part of them became afterwards his personal friends. Even from hoarse Fitzgerald,' he accepted complimentary verses. The piece passed rapidly through four editions, and was then suppressed, as far as in him lay.' He brought home with him a second satire, however, which he called Hints from Horace, and from which Mr. Dallas, in his Recollections, gives a considerable extract. One remarkable couplet, like many parts of his poems, reflects singularly on himself. Satiric rhymes first sprang from selfish spleen, You doubt-see Dryden, Pope, St. Patrick's dean. In this piece also he renews the expressions of his marked contempt for the poet-laureat's productions: Whose Epic mountains never fail in mice. But Mr. Dallas exercised a sound judgment in persuading him to publish, in preference to this poem, the first and second cantos of his Childe Harold, which he also had in great part prepared; and to that gentleman must certainly be awarded the merit of having considerably assisted their final touching. His lordship had imbibed at Cambridge a strong tendency to infidel, if not to atheistical sentiments. This was checked, however, at that period, by the premature death of one of the boldest advocates for infidelity, his particular friend; all intellect and energy, it would appear, like himself. It staggered him, he confessed, that such powers should be for ever lost; that such a mind should be gathered into the corruption, that so speedily awaited the body. And thus the good, The lingering light unwilling to depart, struggled with the bad and cheerless system of too many of his associates for years. Throughout his life, indeed, he seems to wish himself to be considered a desponding rather than a contemptuous sceptic. Mr. Dallas induced him at this time to modify what he would not suppress of his sceptical opinions, and procured the substitution of the beautiful stanza, beginning, Yet if, as holiest men have deemed, there be Frown not upon me churlish priest! that I I ask thee not to prove a Sadducee, Still dream of Paradise, thou knowest not where, But lovest too well to bid thine erring brother share. And, as an an apology for these sentiments generally, he had proposed to insert the following remarkable note: In this age of bigotry, when the puritan and priest have changed places, and the wretched Catholic is visited with the sins of his fathers,' even unto generations far beyond the pale of the commandment, the cast of opinion in these stanzas will doubtless meet with many a contemptuous anathema. But let it be remembered, that the spirit they breathe is desponding, not sneering, scepticism; that he who has seen the Greek and Moslem superstitions contending for mastery over the former shrines of polytheism; who has left in his own country Pharisees, thanking God that they are not like publicans and sinners, and Spaniards in theirs, abhorring the heretics, who have holpen them in their need; will be not a little bewildered, and begin to think, that as only one of them can be right, they may most of them be wrong. With regard to morals, and the effect of religion on mankind, it appears, from all historical testimony, to have had less effect in making them love their neighbours, than inducing that cordial Christian abhorrence between sectaries and schismatics. The Turks and Quakers are the most tolerant ; if an infidel pays his heratch to the former, he may pray how, when, and where he pleases; and the mild tenets and devout demeanor of the latter, make their lives the truest commentary on the sermon of the mount.' additional stanzas of censure on the memorable Mr. Dallas also induced him to suppress three convention of Cintra. One part of the description of the arrival of the news of that treaty being signed we cannot omit. It is not in his printed works, and we know no equal description of the principal personage. Pens, tongues, feet, hands, combined in wild uproar; Mayor, aldermen, laid down the' uplifted fork; The bench of bishops half forgot to snore; Stern COBBETT, who for one whole week forbore To question aught, once more with transport leap't, And bit his devilish quill agen, and swore With foe such treaty never should be kept, Then burst the blatant beast, and roared, and raged, and-slept!!! However Lord Byron might shrink from his own image when drawn with such truth and force, the world has ever since considered him, in point of fact, the hero of the Childe Harold. It supplies all the main points of his character, and that large portion of the actual events of his life which his own genius alone could have grouped in this way. On its publication he was at once highly popular, his relations became friends, his enemies friendly; while the critics trembled and adored. None were more lavish of their commendations than those northern sages, who in the first instance had so unsparingly chastised the young poet. In the winter of 1812, he was the object of universal curiosity and attraction. Various eminent persons courted an introduction to him, some are said even to have volunteered their cards. happened to go early into one fashionable party, into which the Prince Regent came shortly afterwards, and sent a gentleman to him to desire he would be presented. The presentation of course followed; Lord Byron ever after spoke of it with pleasure: the prince did him the honor to say, that he hoped soon to see the author of Childe Harold at Cariton house. In consequence of this, Mr. Dallas tells us, he found his lordship on the next appointed levee day, in a full dress-suit, and just ready to start He for the court, when the levee was suddenly put off. It was the first and last time he was ever so dressed for a British court.' But his poem travelled all over the kingdom with the greatest rapidity; its first impression being taken off in three days. Among the abundant testimonies of applause and respect, he valued none more than a letter he now received from Dr. E. D. Clarke, the traveller, who declares, with all his characteristic ardor, and passionately fond as he had been of poetry from his youth, I was never so much affected by any poem before.' The intended new Satire was now entirely suppressed; together with a similar production, the Curse of Minerva, written on some modern spoliations of Greece. Newstead Abbey, after all, was brought to the hammer at Garraway's, in the autumn of 1812. It was at first bought in, then sold to a Mr. Claughton, for the sum of £140,000, but the purchaser could not complete his bargain: it finally was disposed of some time in 1815. After this, becoming satiated with the hollow praises and pleasures of a fashionable life, he applied himself once more to composition. Mr. Gifford had sent to him, we are told (Dallas's Recollections, p. 386), calling upon him not to give up his time to light compositions, as he had genius to send him to the latest posterity with Milton and Spenser.' Meanwhile he had written the Giaour, and the Bride of Abydos, which sold prodigiously. In December, Mr. D. found him composing the Corsair, which he presented to that gentleman on new year's day, 1814: giving him the copy-right of this, as of all his previous poems. At the end was inserted theStanzas to a Lady Weeping,' which his lordship's more intimate friends assert to have been composed long before his interview with the prince. However this may be, it is supposed to have given great personal offence in a certain high quarter. In May he commenced his Lara, and finished it 24th June. The Siege of Corinth made its appearance almost immediately after. We should have noticed, perhaps earlier, his maiden speech in the House of Lords. This was delivered, February, 1812, against the Nottingham frame-work bill. He took great pains in its composition, and is said to have delivered it with considerable energy: he once more addressed the House in favor of Catholic emancipation, as it is termed, and a third and last time, when he presented a petition of Major Cartwright's, on reform. But if he had nerve, he had not steadiness enough for a political life in England. He seems always to have felt it was not his forté, and says he could never have adhered to any party. The late Lord Londonderry, he told Captain Medwin, however, was the only public character which he ever tested de In January, 1815, he obtained the hand of Miss Anna Isabella Milbanke, daughter of Sir Ralph Milbanke Noel, Bart. having proposed himself as a suitor a year before, and been rejected. The marriage was an unhappy one. Lord Byron with all his scepticism was superstitious; he remarked to Mr. Moore, on his first introduction to the lady, that he stumbled going up stairs, and the omen was bad. The fortune he received with this lady was not, as it has been stated, very large, and his own having been at this time much reduced, his lavish expenditure could be sustained but for a few months. He was soon beset by importunate creditors; the bailiffs entered his house within the first year of their marriage, and lady Byron, after giving birth to a daughter, December 10th, returned to her father's. The baronet wrote at first to announce her determination not to return: lord Byron refused, very properly, to credit this; the resolution, however, was shortly after avowed by her ladyship; and a final separation took place. Its merits and demerits seem to have been a considerable topic in the suppressed 'Memoirs' of his lordship; at least so he is reported to have told captain Medwin, and that he forwarded the narrative' for lady Byron's sanction. This she refused to give; and the public has been supplied with nothing further respecting this event. Lord Byron said I have prejudices about women. I do not like to see them eat. Rousseau makes Julie un peu gourmande; but that is not at all according to my taste. I do not like to be interrupted when I am writing. Lady Byron did not attend to these whims of mine. The only harsh thing I ever remember saying to her, was one evening, shortly before our parting. I was standing before the fire, ruminating upon the embarrassment of my affairs, and other annoyances, when lady Byron came up to me, and said Byron, am I in your way?' to which I replied damnably!' I was afterwards sorry, and reproached myself for the expression; but it escaped me unconsciously, involuntarily; I hardly knew what I said.' He now left England, expressing his resolution not to return, and crossed over to France, through which he passed to Brussels, taking the field of Waterloo on his way. Hence he proceeded to the banks of the Rhine, Switzerland, and the north of Italy; and resided for some time at Venice, where Mr. Hobhouse joined him, and they together started for Rome, where he completed the third canto of Childe Harold. In 1816 appeared the Prisoner of Chillon, a Dream, and other poems; and in 1817 Manfred, a tragedy, and the Lament of Tasso. In his excursions at this time from Italy, we find him taking up his abode for some time at Abydos; whence he proceded to Tenedos and the island of Scio, where he staid three months, during which time he explored every classical scene, and all the celebrated islands. At length he reached Athens, where, in 1818, he sketched the fourth and last canto of Childe Harold. In this year was also published the jeu d'esprit of Beppo, and in 1819 the romantic tale Mazeppa. This year also he forwarded to England the commencement of his Don Juan, to which Mr. Murray his bookseller, refused to put his name. The performance as a whole is generally considered as a degradation to lord Byron's genius; while unquestionable traces of it appear in various parts. Some of his friends attempt to defend it as an improvement on the looser Italian models which he professes to follow. He him self dignified it when about half written with the name of an epic, and complained loudly of the conduct of his publisher. It assuredly is in this country the dead weight of his poetical fame. In 1820 he sent home Marino Faliero, Doge of Venice, a tragedy, having only as designed for the stage, the equivocal recommendation of a close attention to the dramatic unities. It was a failure lord Byron afterwards affirmed that it never was offered to the theatre with his approbation; but was evidently mortified at its being considered that he could not succeed in this species of composition. Shortly after he addressed a letter to the Rev. W. L. Bowles, on the poetical character of Pope, which he considers to have been unfairly depreciated in that writer's Life of the Poet. In the same year, 1820, appeared the Drama of Sardanapalus, the best of his tragic productions; The Two Foscari, a tragedy; and Cain, a Mystery. Lord Byron, on being much censured for the speeches given to Lucifer and Cain, in this piece, defended himself by the example of Milton, and asked how the first rebel and the first murderer ought to be made to speak? It is a poem displaying great occasional energy; but Mr. Hobhouse called it bombastical, and considered the publication of it disgraceful, we are told. (Medwin's Conversations, p. 187) Lord Byron characterised it as the finest thing he ever wrote. His gravest and best defence is addressed to his bookseller. If Cain be blasphemous, Paradise Lost is blasphemous; and the words of that Oxford gentleman, 'evil be thou my good,' are from that very poem, from the mouth of Satan,-and is there any thing more in that of Lucifer, in the Mystery? Cain is nothing more than a drama, not a piece of argument. If Lucifer and Cain speak as the first rebel and the first murderer may be supposed to speak, nearly all the rest of the personages talk also according to their characters; and the stronger passions have been permitted to the drama. I have avoided introducing the Deity as in Scripture, though Milton does, and not very wisely either; but have adopted his angel as sent to Cain instead, on purpose to avoid shocking the feelings on the subject, by falling short of what all uninspired men must fall short in, viz. giving an adequate notion of the effect of the presence of Jehovah. The old Mysteries introduced Him liberally enough, and all this I avoided in the new one.' Lord Byron clearly forgets in all this that Milton's Satan is never suffered to make the worse appear at last the better cause: and that the whole weight of his own personal character and habits were well known to be (speaking charitably) not on the same side of the balance with those of the great poet of the commonwealth. Our poet quitted Venice for Pisa in 1821. What will our fair readers say to the following sentiments imputed to him by Captain Medwin. wrote little at Venice, and was forced into the search of pleasure, an employment I was soon jaded with the pursuit of. Women were there, as they have ever been fated to be, my bane; like Napoleon, I have always had a great contempt for women; and formed this opinion of them not hastily, but from my own fatal experience. I My writings, indeed, tend to exalt the sex; and my imagination has always delighted in giving them beau ideal likeness, but I only drew them as a painter or statuary would do, as they should be; perhaps my prejudices, and keeping them at a distance, contributed to prevent the illusion from altogether being worn out and destroyed as to their celestial qualities. They are in an unnatural state of society. The Turks and eastern people manage these matters better than we do. They lock them up, and they are much happier. Give a woman a looking-glass and a few sugarplumbs, and she will be satisfied. I have suffered from the other sex ever since I remember anything. I began by being jilted, and ended by being unwived. Those are the wisest who make no connexions of wife or mistress.' At this his last place of residence in Italy, he became acquainted with the Gamba family; and formed at the house of her father no equivocal acquaintance with the countess Guiccioli, a lady who at twenty years of age had married a husband of sixty; who tolerated the connexion with his lordship. The lady was of course all attraction, and lord Byron longer devoted to her, we believe than to any other of his connexions of this kind: but from such fathers-matches-husbands—and lovers, may our native land at least be long preserved! Mr. Leigh Hunt, who had been invited out to Italy with his family, joined him at Pisa in 1822, and with this writer, in conjunction with Mr. Percy Bysshe Shelley, the publication called The Liberal, was commenced, which owing to the unhappy fate of Mr. Shelley (who perished by the upsetting of a boat in the Mediterranean), extended only to four numbers. In this periodical work appeared the celebrated Vision of Judg ment, caused by a performance of the same foolish title, written by Mr. Southey. Our opinion of these performances approaches that of an orator, (the Rev. Mr. Irving), who has on some occasions no small share of the true poetic feeling. He says, with the one blasphemy is virtue when it makes for loyalty; with the other blasphemy is the food and spice of jest-making.—I know not whether the self confident tone of the one, or the ill-placed merriment of the other, displeaseth me the more. It is ignoble and impious to rob the sublimest of subjects of all its grandeur and effect, in order to serve wretched interests and vulgar passions.' Heaven and Earth, a mystery, first appeared also in the Liberal. It is founded on the alleged intercourse between angels and the daughters of men before the flood. Werner, a tragedy; the Deformed Transformed, a drama; and the last cantos of Don Juan, complete the list of lord Byron's works, all of which he finished prior to the autumn of 1822. Don Juan we exclude from all consideration as a work of lord Byron: it is unworthy of him. But the March on Rome of the Deformed Transformed is worthy of his best days. We can only find space for the first two stanzas, and the concluding one. 1. "Tis the morn, but dim and dark. Whither flies the silent lark? Whither shrinks the clouded sun? Is the day indeed begun ? Nature's eye is melancholy O'er the city high and holy: Round which yellow Tiber dashes. 2. Hearken to the steady stamp! As the tides obey the moon, On they march, though to self-slaughter, Whose high waves o'ersweep the border 8. Yet once more, ye old Penates! Let not your quenched hearths be Ate's ' Yet again ye shadowy heroes, Yield not to these stranger Neros! Though the son who slew his mother, Shed Rome's blood, he was your brother: 'Twas the Roman curbed the Roman ;Brennus was the baffled foeman. Yet again ye Saints and Martyrs, Rise for yours are holier charters. Mighty gods of temples falling, Yet in ruin still appalling! Mightier founders of those altars, True, and Christian,-strike the assaulters! Tyber! Tyber! let thy torrent Show even nature's self abhorrent. Let each breathing heart dilated Turn, as doth the lion baited! Lord Byron quitted Pisa in the autumn of 1822, and wintered at Genoa. The motives which induced him to leave Italy and join the Greeks, struggling for emancipation from the yoke of their ignorant and cruel oppressors, are the most creditable, upon the whole, of any which ever swayed his wayward mind. It was in Greece that his high poetical faculties had been first most powerfully developed; and they who know the delight attendant, even in a very inferior degree, upon this process, will know how to appreciate the tender associations which cling to the scenes and the persons that have first stimulated their genius. Greece, a land of the most venerable and illustrious history, of a peculiarly grand and beautiful scenery, inhabited by various races, of the most wild and picturesque manners, was to him the land of excitement, never cloying-never wearying, ever changing excitement.' 'Such,' continues an able contemporary writer, 'must necessarily have been the chosen and favorite spot of a man of powerful and original intellect, of quick and sensible feelings, of a restless and untameable spirit, of warm affections, of various information, and, above all, of one satiated and disgusted with the If thou regret thy youth, why live? Is here-Up to the field and give Awake not Greece-She is awake, Lord Byron embarked at Leghorn and arrived in Cephalonia in the early part of August 1823, attended by a suite of six or seven friends in an English vessel (the Hercules, captain Scott), which he had hired for the purpose of taking him to Greece. His lordship had never seen any of the volcanic mountains, and for this purpose the vessel deviated from its regular course in order to pass the island of Stromboli. The vessel lay off this place a whole night in the hopes of witnessing the usual phenomena, when, for the first time within the memory of man, the volcano emitted no fire, and the disappointed poet was obliged to proceed, in no good humor with the forge of Vulcan. We abridge the Narrative of a Friend of Greece for the sequel. 'It was a point of importance to determine on the particular part of Greece to which his lordship should direct his course-the country was afflicted by intestine divisions, and lord Byron thought that if he wished to serve it, he must keep aloof from faction. The different parties had their respective seats of influence, and to choose a residence, if not in fact, was in appearance, to choose a party. In a country where communication is impeded by natural obstacles and unassisted by civilised regulations, which had scarcely succeeded in expelling a barbarian master, and where the clashing interests of contending factions often make it advantageous to conceal the truth, the extreme difficulty of procuring accurate information may be easily supposed. It, therefore, became necessary to make some stay in a place which might serve as a convenient post of observation, and from which assistance could be rendered where it appeared to be most needed. Cephalonia was fixed upon; where lord Byron was extremely well received by the English civil and military authorities, who, generally speaking, seemed well inclined to further the objects of his visit to Greece. Anxious, however, to avoid involving the government of the island in any difficulty respecting himself, or for some other cause, he remained on board the vessel until further intelligence could be procured. When lord Byron arrived in the Ionian Islands, Greece, though even then an intelligent observer could scarcely entertain a doubt of her ultimate |