The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Love Affairs of Lord Byron, by Francis Henry Gribble

THE LOVE AFFAIRS OF LORD BYRON

Works by the Same Author

MADAME DE STAËL AND HER LOVERS

GEORGE SAND AND HER LOVERS

ROSSEAU AND THE WOMEN HE LOVED

CHATEAUBRIAND AND HIS COURT OF WOMEN

THE PASSIONS OF THE FRENCH ROMANTICS

Lord Byron.

THE LOVE AFFAIRS
OF LORD BYRON

BY FRANCIS GRIBBLE
AUTHOR OF “GEORGE SAND AND HER LOVERS” ETC.

LONDON
EVELEIGH NASH
FAWSIDE HOUSE
1910

PREFACE

Whether a book is called “The Love Affairs of Lord Byron” or “The Life of Lord Byron” can make very little difference to the contents of its pages. Byron’s love affairs were the principal incidents of his life, and almost the only ones. Like Chateaubriand, he might have spoke of “a procession of women” as the great panoramic effect of his career. He differed from Chateaubriand, however, in the first place, in not professing to be very much concerned by the pageant, and, in the second place, in being, in reality, very deeply affected by it. Chateaubriand kept his emotions well in hand, exaggerating them in retrospect for the sake of literary effect, picturing the sensibility of his heart in polished phrases, but never giving the impression of a man who has suffered through his passions, or been swept off his feet by them, or diverted by them from the pursuit of ambition or the serene cult of the all-important ego. In all Chateaubriand’s love affairs, in short, red blood is lacking and self-consciousness prevails. He appears to be equally in love with all the women in the procession; the explanation being that he is more in love with himself than with any of them. In spite of the procession of women, which is admitted to have been magnificent, it may justly be said of Chateaubriand that love was “of his life a thing apart.”

Of Byron, who coined the phrase (though Madame de Staël had coined it before him) it cannot be said. It may appear to be true of sundry of his incidental love affairs, but it cannot stand as a broad generalisation. His whole life was deflected from its course, and thrown out of gear: first, by his unhappy passion for Mary Chaworth; secondly, by the way in which women of all ranks, flattering his vanity for the gratification of their own, importuned him with the offer of their hearts. Lady Byron herself did so no less than Lady Caroline Lamb, and Jane Clairmont, and the Venetian light o’ loves, though, no doubt, with more delicacy and a better show of maidenly reserve. Fully persuaded in her own mind that he had pined for her for two years, she delicately hinted to him that he need pine no longer. He took the hint and married her, with the catastrophic consequences which we know. Then other women—a long series of other women—did what they could to break his fall and console him. He dallied with them for years, without ever engaging his heart very deeply, until at last he realised that this sort of dalliance was a very futile and enervating occupation, tore himself away from his last entanglement, and crossed the sea to strike a blow for freedom.

That is Byron’s life in a nutshell. His biographer, it is clear, has no way of escape from his love affairs; while the critic is under an obligation, almost equally compelling, to take note of them. It is not merely that he was continually writing about them, and that the meaning of his enigmatic sentences can, in many cases, only be unravelled by the help of the clue which a knowledge of his love affairs provides. The striking change which we see the tone of his work undergoing as he grows older is the reflection of the history of his heart. Many of his later poems might have been written in mockery of the earlier ones. He had his illusions in his youth. In his middle-age, if he can be said to have reached middle-age, he had none, but wrote, to the distress of the Countess Guiccioli, as a man who delighted to tear aside, with a rude hand, the striped veil of sentiment and hypocrisy which hid the ugly nakedness of truth. The secret of that transformation is written in the record of his love affairs, and can be read nowhere else. His life lacks all unity and all consistency unless the first place in it is given to that record.

Since the appearance of Moore’s Life, and even since the appearance of Cordy Jeaffreson’s “Real Lord Byron,” a good deal of new information has been made available. The biographer has to take cognisance of the various documents brought together in Mr. Murray’s latest edition of Byron’s Writings and Letters; of Hobhouse’s “Account of the Separation”; of the “Confessions,” for whatever they may be worth, elicited from Jane Clairmont and first printed in the Nineteenth Century; of Mr. Richard Edgcumbe’s “Byron: the Last Phase”; and of the late Lord Lovelace’s privately printed work, “Astarte.”

The importance of each of these authorities will appear when reference is made to it in the text. It will be seen, then, that some of the Murray MSS. give precision to the narrative of Byron’s relations with Lady Caroline Lamb, and that others effectually dispose of Cordy Jeaffreson’s theory that Lady Byron’s mysterious grievance—the grievance which caused her lawyer to declare reconciliation impossible—was her husband’s intimacy with Miss Clairmont. Others of them, again, as effectually confute Cordy Jeaffreson’s amazing doctrine that Byron only brought railing accusations against his wife because he loved her, and that at the time when he denounced her as “the moral Clytemnestra of thy lord,” he was in reality yearning to be recalled to the nuptial bed. Concerning “Astarte” some further remarks may be made.

It is a disgusting and calumnious compilation, designed, apparently, to show that Byron’s descendants accept the worst charges preferred against him by his enemies during his lifetime. Those charges are such that one would have expected a member of the family to hold his tongue about them, even if he were in possession of evidence conclusively demonstrating their truth. That a member of the family should have revived the charges on the strength of evidence which may justly be described as not good enough to hang a dog on almost surpasses belief. Still, the thing has been done, and the biographer’s obligations are affected accordingly. Unpleasant though the subject is, he must examine the so-called evidence for fear lest he should be supposed to feel himself unable to rebut it; and he is under the stronger compulsion to do so because the mud thrown by Lord Lovelace is not thrown at Byron only, but also at Augusta Leigh, a most worthy and womanly woman, and the best of sisters and wives. It is the hope and belief of the present writer that he has succeeded in definitely clearing her character, together with that of her brother, and demonstrated that the legend of the crime, so industriously inculated by Byron’s grandson, has no shadow of foundation in fact.

Francis Gribble

CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

CHAPTER I

ANCESTORS, PARENTS, AND HEREDITARY INFLUENCES

The Byrons came over with the Conqueror, helped him to conquer, and were rewarded with a grant of landed estates in Lancashire. Hundreds of years elapsed before they distinguished themselves either for good or evil, or emerged from the ruck of the landed gentry. There were Byrons at Crecy, and at the siege of Calais; and there probably were Byrons among the Crusaders. There is even a legend of a Byron Crusader rescuing a Christian maiden from the Saracens; but neither the maiden nor the Crusader can be identified. The authentic history of the family only begins with the grant of Newstead Abbey, at the time of the dissolution of the monasteries, to Sir John Byron of Clayton, in Lancashire—a reward, apparently, for services rendered by his father at the Battle of Bosworth Field.

Even so, however, the Byrons remained comparatively inconspicuous[1]; and their records only begin to be full and interesting at the time of the war between Charles I. and his Parliament. Seven Byrons, all brothers, then fought on the King’s side; and the most distinguished of the seven was the eldest, another Sir John Byron of Clayton—a loyal, valiant, and impetuous soldier, with more zeal than discretion. It was his charge that broke Haslerig’s cuirassiers at Roundway Down. It was in his regiment that Falkland was fighting when he fell at Newbury. On the other hand he helped to lose the battle of Marston Moor by charging without orders. “By Lord Byron’s improper charge,” Prince Rupert reported, “much harm hath been done.”

He had been given his peerage—with limitations in default of issue male to his six surviving brothers and the issue male of their bodies—in the midst of the war. After Naseby, he went to Paris, and spent the rest of his life in exile. His first wife being dead, he married a second—a lady concerning whom there is a piquant note in Pepys’ Diary. She was, Pepys tells us, one of Charles II.’s mistresses—his “seventeenth mistress aboard,” who, as the diarist proceeds, “did not leave him till she got him to give her an order for £4000 worth of plate; but, by delays, thanks be to God! she died before she got it.”

This first Lord Byron died childless, and the title passed to his brother Richard, who had also distinguished himself in the war on the King’s side. He was one of the colonels whose gallantry at Edgehill the University of Oxford rewarded with honorary degrees; and he was Governor, successively, of Appleby and Newark. He tried to seduce his kinsman, Colonel Hutchinson, from his allegiance to the Parliament, but without avail. “Except,” Colonel Hutchinson told him, “he found his own heart prone to such treachery, he might consider that there was, if nothing else, so much of a Byron’s blood in him that he should very much scorn to betray or quit a trust he had undertaken.”

The third Lord, Richard’s son William, succeeded to the title in 1679. His marriage with Elizabeth, daughter of Viscount Chaworth, brings the name of the heroine of the poet’s first and last love into the story; and he is also notable as the first Byron who had a taste, if not actually a turn, for literature. Thomas Shipman, the royalist singer whose songs indicate, according to Mr. Thomas Seccombe’s criticism in the “Dictionary of National Biography,” that “the severe morals of the Roundheads were even less to his taste than their politics,” was his intimate friend; and Shipman’s “Carolina” contains a set of verses from his pen:

“My whole ambition only does extend
To gain the name of Shipman’s faithful friend;
And though I cannot amply speak your praise,
I’ll wear the myrtle, tho’ you wear the bays.”

That is a fair specimen of the third Lord Byron’s poetical style; and it is clear that his descendant did not need to be a great poet in order to improve upon it. Of his son, the fourth Lord, who died in 1736, there is nothing to be said; but his grandson, the fifth Lord, lives in history and tradition as “the wicked Lord Byron.” The report of his arraignment before his fellow peers on the charge of murdering his relative, Mr. William Chaworth, in 1765, may be read in the Nineteenth Volume of State Trials, though the most careful reading is likely to leave the rights of the case obscure.

The tragedy, whatever the rights of it, occurred after one of the weekly dinners of the Nottinghamshire County Club, at the Star and Garter Tavern in Pall Mall. The quarrel arose out of a heated discussion on the subject of preserving game—a topic which country gentlemen are particularly liable to discuss with heat. Lord Byron is said to have advocated leniency, and Mr. Chaworth severity, towards poachers. The argument led to a wager; and the two men went upstairs together—apparently for the purpose of arranging the terms of the wager—and entered a room lighted only by a dull fire and a single candle. As soon as the door was closed, they drew their swords and fought, and Lord Byron ran Mr. Chaworth through the body.

Those are the only points on which all the depositions agree. Lord Byron said that Chaworth, who was the better swordsman of the two, challenged him to fight, and that the fight was conducted fairly. The case for the prosecution was that Chaworth did not mean to fight, and that Lord Byron attacked him unawares. Chaworth, though he lingered for some hours, and was questioned on the subject, said nothing to exonerate his assailant. That, broadly speaking, was the evidence on which the peers had to come to their decision; and they found Lord Byron not guilty of murder but guilty of manslaughter. Pleading his privilege as a peer, he was released on payment of the fees.

Society, however, inclined to the view that he had not fought fairly. Two years before he had been Master of the Stag-hounds. Now he was cut by the county, and relapsed into misanthropic debauchery. He quarrelled with his son, the Honorable William Byron, sometime M.P. for Morpeth, for contracting a marriage of which he disapproved. He drove his wife away from Newstead by his brutality, and consorted with a low-born “Lady Betty.” The stories of his shooting his coachman and trying to drown his wife were untrue, but his neighbours believed them, and behaved accordingly; and an unpleasant picture of his retirement may be found in Horace Walpole’s Letters.

“The present Lord,” Horace Walpole writes, “hath lost large sums, and paid part in old oaks; five thousand pounds worth have been cut down near the house. En revanche, he has built two baby forts to pay his country in castles for the damage done to the Navy, and planted a handful of Scotch firs that look like plough-boys dressed in old family liveries for a public day.”

Playing at naval battles and bombardments, with toy ships, on the little lakes in his park, was, indeed, the favourite, if not the only, recreation of the wicked lord’s old age. It is said that his chief purpose in cutting down the timber was to spite and embarrass his heirs; and he did, at any rate, involve his heir in a law suit almost as long as the famous case of Jarndyce versus Jarndyce by means of an improper sale of the Byron property at Rochdale.

His heir, however, was not to be either his son or his grandson. They both predeceased him—the latter dying in Corsica in 1794—and the title and estates passed to the issue of his brother John, known to the Navy List as Admiral Byron, and to the navy as “foul weather Jack.”

The Admiral had been round the world with Anson, had been wrecked on the coast of Chili, and had published a narrative—“my granddad’s narrative”—of his hardships and adventures. He had later been sent round the world on a voyage of discovery on his own account, but had discovered nothing in particular. Finally he had fought, not too successfully, against d’Estaing in the West Indies, and had withdrawn to misanthropic isolation. His son, Captain Byron, of the Guards, known to his contemporaries as “Mad Jack Byron,” was a handsome youth of worthless character, but very fascinating to women. His elopement, while still a minor, with the Marchioness of Carmarthen, was one of the sensational events of a London season.

Lady Carmarthen’s husband having divorced her, Mad Jack married her in 1778. They lived together in Paris and at Chantilly—prosperously, for the bride had £4000 a year in her own right. A child was born—Augusta, who subsequently married Colonel Leigh; but, in 1784, his wife died, and Captain Byron, heavily in debt, was once more thrown on his own resources. He returned to England to look for an heiress, and he found one in the person of Miss Gordon of Gight, whom he met and married at Bath in 1786.

The fortune, when the landed estates had been realised, amounted to about £23,000; and Captain Byron’s clamorous creditors took most of it. A considerable portion of what was left was quickly squandered in riotous living on the Continent. The ultimate income consisted of the interest (subject to an annuity to Mrs. Byron’s grandmother) on the sum of £4200; and that lamentable financial position had already been reached when Captain and Mrs. Byron came back to England and took a furnished house in Holles Street, where George Noel Gordon, sixth Lord Byron, was born on January 22, 1788.

There we have, in brief outline, all that is essential of the little that is known of Byron’s heredity. If it is not precisely common-place, it is at least undistinguished. No one can ever have generalised from it and said that the Byrons were brilliant, or even—in spite of the third Lord’s conscientious attempts at versification—that they were “literary.” A far more likely generalisation would have been that the Byrons were mad.

They were not quite that, of course, though some of them were eccentric; and those who were eccentric had the courage of their eccentricity. But they were, at least so far as we know them, impetuous and reckless men—men who went through life in the spirit of a bull charging a gate, doing what they chose to do because they chose to do it, with a defiant air of “damn the consequences.” We find that note alike in the first Lord’s “improper charge” on Marston Moor, and the fifth Lord’s improvised duel in the dark room of the Pall Mall tavern, and in Captain Byron’s dashing elopement with a noble neighbour’s wife. We shall catch it again, and more than once, in our survey of the career of the one Byron who has been famous; and we shall see how much his fame owed to his pride, his determined indifference, in spite of his prickly sensitiveness, to public opinion, and his clear-cut, haughty character.

Legh Richmond, the popular evangelical preacher, once said that, if Byron had been as bad a poet as he was a man, his poetry would have done but little harm, but that criticism is almost an inversion of the truth. Byron, in fact, imposed himself far less because his poetry was good than because his personality was strong. He never saw as far into the heart of things as Wordsworth. When he tried to do so, at Shelley’s instigation, he only saw what Wordsworth had already shown; and there are many passages in his work which might fairly be described as being “like Wordsworth only less so.” None of his shorter pieces are fit to stand beside “The world is too much with us,” and he never wrote a line so wonderfully inspired as Wordsworth’s “still, sad music of humanity.”

But he had one advantage over Wordsworth. He spoke out; he was not afraid of saying things. His genius had all the hard riding, neck-or-nothing temper of the earlier, undistinguished Byrons behind it. He was “dowered with the hate of hate, the scorn of scorn,”—and he damned the consequences with the haphazard blasphemy of an aristocrat who feels sure of himself, and has no need to pick his words. He was quite ready to damn them in the presence of ladies, and in the face of kings; and he damned them as one having authority, and not as the democratic upstarts; so that the world listened attentively, wondering what he would say next, and even Shelley, observing how easily he compelled a hearing, was fully persuaded that Byron was a greater poet than himself.

That, in the main, it would seem, was how heredity affected him. The hereditary influences, however, were, in their turn modified by the strange circumstances of his upbringing; and it is time to glance at them, and see how far they help to account for the loneliness and aloofness of Byron’s temperament, for the sensitiveness already referred to, and for the ultimate attitude known as the Byronic pose.

CHAPTER II

CHILDHOOD AND SCHOOLDAYS AT ABERDEEN, DULWICH, AND HARROW

Captain and Mrs. Byron, finding themselves impoverished, left Holles Street, and retired to Aberdeen, to live on an income of £150 a year. Augusta having been taken off their hands by her grandmother, Lady Holderness, they were alone together, with the baby and the nurse, in cheap and gloomy lodgings; and they soon began to wrangle. It was the old story, no doubt, of poverty coming in at the door and love flying out of the window, leaving only incompatibility of temper behind.

The husband, though inclined to be amiable as long as things went well, was, in modern phrase, a “waster.” The wife, though shrewd and possessed of some domestic virtues, was, in the language of all time, a scold. He wanted to run into debt in order to keep up appearances; she to disregard appearances in order to live within her income. Dinners of many courses and wines of approved vintages seemed to her the superfluities but to him the necessaries of life. He probably did not mince words in expressing his view of the matter; she certainly minced none in expressing hers. There is a strong presumption, too, that she complained of him to her neighbours; for it is well attested in her son’s letters to his sister that she was that sort of woman. So the day came when Captain Byron walked out of the house, vowing that he would live with his wife no longer.

For a time he lived in a separate lodging in the same street. Presently, scraping some money together—borrowing it, that is to say, without any intention of repaying it—he went to France to amuse himself; and in January 1791, at the age of thirty-five, he died at Valenciennes. It has been suggested that he committed suicide, but nothing is known for certain. One of Byron’s earliest recollections was of his mother’s weeping at the news of her husband’s death, and of his own astonishment at her tears. She had continually nagged at him, and heaped abuse on him, while he lived; yet now her distracted shrieks filled the house and disturbed the neighbourhood. That was the child’s earliest lesson in the unaccountable ways of women. He was only three at the time—yet old enough to wonder, though not to understand.

His stay at Aberdeen was to last for seven more years. He was to go to school there, and to be accounted a dunce, though not a fool. He was to learn religion there from his nurse, who taught him the dark, alarming Calvinistic doctrine; and he was to develop some of the traits and characteristics which were afterwards to be pronounced. On the whole, indeed, in spite of alleviations, he had a gloomy childhood, by a sense, however imperfectly comprehended, of the contrast between life as it was and life as it ought to have been.

He had been born proud, inheriting quite as much pride from his mother’s as from his father’s family. He soon came to know that there were such things as old families, and that the Byron family was one of the oldest of them. It was borne in upon him by what he saw and heard that the proper place for a baron was a baronial hall; and he could see that the apartment in which he was growing up was neither a hall nor baronial. The first apartment occupied by his mother was, in fact, as has already been said, a lodging, and the second was an “upper part,” the furniture of which, when it ultimately came to be sold, fetched exactly £74 17s. 7d.

The boy must have felt—we may depend upon it that his mother told him—that there was something wrong about that; that his school companions were make-shift associates, not really worthy of him; that he was, as it were, a child born in exile, and unjustly kept out of his rights. The feeling must have grown stronger—we may be quite sure that his mother stimulated it—when the unexpected death of his cousin made him the direct heir to the title and estates; and, indeed, it was a feeling to some extent justified by the facts. His great-uncle, the wicked Lord Byron, ought then, as everybody said, to have shown signs of recognition, and to have offered an allowance.

He made no sign, however, and he offered no allowance. Instead of doing so, he went on felling timber, and effected the illegal sale of the Rochdale property already referred too; and for four more years—from the age of six, roughly speaking, to the age of ten—the heir apparent to the barony was living poorly in an Aberdeen “upper part,” while the actual baron was living in luxury and state at Newstead. There were good grounds for bitterness and resentment there; and Mrs. Byron, with her unruly tongue, was the woman to make the most of them. Family pride grew apace under her influence; and there was no other influence to check or counteract it. The boy learnt to be as proud of his birth as a parvenu would like to be—a characteristic of which we shall presently note some examples.

If he was proud, however, he was also sensitive: and it may well have been that his pride was, to some extent, a shield of protection which his sensitiveness threw up. He was sensitive, not only because he was poor when he ought to be rich and insignificant when he ought to be important, but also because he was lame. An injury done at birth to his Achilles tendons prevented him from planting his heels firmly on the ground. He had to trot on the ball of his foot instead of walking; he could not even trot for more than a mile or so at a time. A physical defect of that sort is always a haunting grief to a child—especially so, perhaps, to a child with a dawning consciousness of great mental gifts. It appears to such a child as an irreparable wrong done—a wrong which can never be either righted or avenged—an irremovable mark of inferiority, inviting taunts and gibes.

Byron was sensitive on the subject, fearing that it made him ridiculous, throughout his life, alike when he was the darling and when he was the outcast of society; and various stories show how the deformity embittered his childhood.

“What a pretty boy Byron is! What a pity he has such a leg!” he, one day, heard a lady say to his nurse.

“Dinna speak of it,” he screamed, stamping his foot, and slashing at her with his toy whip.

And then there is the story of his mother who, in one of her fits of passion, called him “a lame brat.”

He drew himself up, and, with a restraint and a concentrated scorn beyond his years, replied in the word which he afterwards put into “The Hunchback”:

“I was born so, mother.”

That was one of the passionate scenes that passed between them—but only one among many; and it was only in the case of this one affront which cut him to the quick, that the child displayed such precocious self-control. More often he answered rage with rage and violence with violence. In one fit of fury he tore his new frock to shreds; in another he tried to stab himself, at table, with a dinner knife. Exactly why he did it, or what he resented, he probably did not know either at the time, or afterwards; but he vaguely felt, no doubt, that something was wrong with the world, and instinct impelled him to kick against the pricks and damn the whole nature of things.

Then, in 1798, came the sudden change of fortune. The wicked Lord Byron was dead at last; and the child of ten was a peer of the realm and the heir to great, though heavily mortgaged estates. He could not take possession of them yet—the embarrassed property needed to be delicately nursed—but still, subject to the charges, they were his. He was taken to look at them, and then, a tenant having been found for Newstead, Mrs. Byron settled, first at Nottingham, and then in London, and her son was sent to school—first to a preparatory school at Dulwich, and then to Harrow.

Even so, however, there remained something strange, abnormal, and uncomfortable about his position. On the one hand, Mrs. Byron, not understanding, or trying to understand, him, nagged and scolded until he lost almost all his natural affection for her. On the other hand, his father’s relatives, whether because they felt that “Mad Jack” had disgraced the family, or because they objected to Mrs. Byron—who, in truth, in spite of her good birth, was extremely provincial in her style, and of loquacious, mischief-making propensities—were very far from cordial. They had not even troubled to communicate with her when the death of her son’s cousin made him the direct heir, but had left her to learn the news accidentally from strangers. Lord Carlisle, the son of his grandfather’s sister, Isabella Byron, consented to act as his guardian, but abstained from making friendly overtures.

The fault in that case, however, was almost entirely Mrs. Byron’s. There was some dispute between her and Dr. Glennie, her son’s Dulwich headmaster—a dispute which culminated in a fit of hysterics in Dr. Glennie’s study. Lord Carlisle was appealed to, and the result of his attempt at mediation was that Mrs. Byron practically ordered him out of the house. Byron, of course, could not help that; but, equally of course, he suffered from it. He was neglected, and he was sensible of the neglect. He had come into a world in which he had every right to move, only to be made to feel that he was not wanted there. Born in exile, and having returned from exile, he was cold-shouldered by kinsmen who seemed to think that he would have done better to remain in exile.

Very likely he was, at that age, somewhat of a lout, shy, ill at ease, and unprepossessing. Genius does not necessarily reflect itself in polished behaviour. Aberdeen is not as good a school of manners as Eton, and Mrs. Byron was but an indifferent teacher of deportment. But his pride, it seems clear, was not the less but the greater because of his inability to express it in strict accordance with the rules of the best society. He was a Byron—a peer of the realm—the senior representative of an ancient house. He knew that respect, and even homage, were due to him; and he felt that he must assert himself—if not in one way, then in another. So, when the Earl of Portsmouth—a peer of comparatively recent creation—presumed to give his ear a friendly pinch, he asserted himself by picking up a sea-shell and throwing it at the Earl of Portsmouth’s head. That would teach the Earl, he said, not to take liberties with other members of the aristocracy.

At this date, too, when writing to his mother, he addressed her as “the Honorable Mrs. Byron,” a designation to which, of course, she had no shadow of a right; and he earned the nickname of “the old English Baron” by his habit of boasting to his schoolfellows of the amazing antiquity of his lineage. Lord Carlisle may well have thought that it was high time for his ward to go to Harrow to be licked or kicked into shape. He went there in 1803, at the age of thirteen and a half.

Dr. Drury, of Harrow, was the first man who saw in Byron the promise of future distinction. “He has talents, my lord,” he soon assured his guardian, “which will add lustre to his rank.” Whereat Lord Carlisle merely shrugged his shoulders and said, “Indeed!”—whether because his ward’s talents were a matter of indifference to him, or because he considered that rank could dispense with the lustre which talents bestow.

According to his own recollections, Byron was quick but indolent. He could run level in the class-room with Sir Robert Peel, who afterwards took a sensational double-first at Oxford, when he chose; but, as a rule, he did not choose. He absorbed a good deal of scholarship, without ever becoming a good scholar in the technical sense, and his declamations on the speech-days were much applauded. There are records to the effect that he was bullied. A specially offensive insult directed at him in later life drew from him the retort that he had not passed through a public school without learning that he was deformed; and Leigh Hunt has related that sometimes “he would wake and find his leg in a tub of water.” But he was not an easy boy to bully, for he was ready to fight on small provocation; and he won all his fights except one. He did credit to his religious training by punching Lord Calthorpe’s head for calling him an atheist, though it is possible that his objections to the obnoxious epithet were as much social as theological, for an atheist, among schoolboys is, by implication, an “outsider.”

“I was a most unpopular boy,” he told Moore, “but led latterly.” The latter statement has been generally accepted by his biographers; but not all the stories told in support of it stand the test of inquiry. There is the story, for instance, accepted even by Cordy Jeaffreson, that he led the revolt against Butler’s appointment to the headmastership, but prevented his followers from burning down one of the class-rooms by reminding them that the names of their ancestors were carved upon the desks. “I can certify,” wrote the late Dean Merivale of Ely, “that just such a story was told in my early days of Sir John Richardson;” so that Byron seems here to have got the credit for another hero’s exploits.

There are the stories, too, of his connection with the first Eton and Harrow cricket match. Cordy Jeaffreson goes so far as to express doubt whether he took part in the match at all; but that is exaggerated scepticism, which research would have confuted. The score is printed in Lillywhite’s “Cricket Scores and Biographies of celebrated Cricketers;” and it appears therefrom that Byron scored seven runs in the first innings and two in the second, and also bowled one wicket; but even on that subject the Dean of Ely, who went to Harrow in 1818, has something to say.

“It is clear,” the Dean writes, “that he was never a leader.... On the contrary, awkward, sentimental, and addicted to dreaming and tombstones, he seems to have been held in little estimation among our spirited athletes. The remark was once made to me by Mr. John Arthur Lloyd (of Salop), a well-known Harrovian, who had been captain of the school in the year of the first match with Eton (1805): ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘Byron played in the match, and very badly too. He should never have been in the eleven if my counsel had been taken.’”

And the Dean goes on, picturing Byron’s awkwardness:

“Mrs. Drury was once heard to say of him: ‘There goes Byron’ (Birron she called him) ‘straggling up the hill, like a ship in a storm without rudder or compass.’”

Byron’s influence at Harrow, in short, was exercised over his juniors rather than his contemporaries. It pleased him, when he was big enough, to protect small boys from school tyrants. One catches his feudal spirit again in his appeal to a bully not to lick Lord Delawarr “because he is a fellow peer”; but he was also ready to intervene in other cases in which that plea could not be urged; and he had the reward that might be expected. He once offered to take a licking for one of the Peels; and he became a hero with hero-worshippers—titled hero-worshippers for the most part—sitting at his feet. Lord Delawarr, Lord Clare, the Duke of Dorset, the Honorable John Wingfield, were the most conspicuous among them. It was from their adulation that he got his first taste of the incense which was, in later years, to be burnt to him so lavishly.

He described his school friendships, when he looked back on them, as “passions”; and there is no denying that the language of the letters which he wrote to his friends was inordinately passionate for a schoolboy addressing schoolfellows. “Dearest” is a more frequent introduction to them than “dear,” and the word “sweet” also occurs. It is not the happiest of signs to find a schoolboy writing such letters; and it is not altogether impossible that unfounded apprehensions caused by them account for the suggestion made by Drury—though the fact is not mentioned in the biographies—that Byron should be quietly removed from the school on the ground that his conduct was causing “much trouble and uneasiness.”

That, however, is uncertain, and one must not insist. All that the so-called “passions”—occasionally detrimental though they may have been to school discipline—demonstrate is Byron’s enjoyment of flattery, and his proneness to sentiment and gush. He liked, as he grew older, to accept flattery, while professing to be superior to it; to enjoy sentiment, and then to laugh at it; to gush with the most gushing, and then suddenly to turn round and “say ‘damn’ instead.” But the cynicism which was afterwards to alternate with the sentimentalism had not developed yet. He did not yet say “damn”—at all events in that connection.

One must think of him as a boy with a great capacity for passionate affection, and a precocious tendency to gush, deprived of the most natural outlets for his emotions. He could not love his mother because she was a virago; he hardly ever saw his sister; his guardian kept him coldly at a distance. Consequently his feelings, dammed in one direction, broke out with almost ludicrous intensity in another; and his friendships were sentimental to a degree unusual, though not, of course, unknown or unprecedented, among schoolboys. He wrote sentimental verses to his friends.

But not to them alone. “Hours of Idleness,” first published when he was a Cambridge undergraduate, is the idealised record of his school friendships; but it is also the idealised record of other, and very different, excursions into sentiment. It introduces us to Mary Duff, to Margaret Parker, to Mary Chaworth,—and also to some other Maries of less importance; and we will turn back and glance, in quick succession at their stories before following Byron to Cambridge.

CHAPTER III

A SCHOOLBOY’S LOVE AFFAIRS—MARY DUFF, MARGARET PARKER, AND MARY CHAWORTH

First on the list of early loves comes little Mary Duff of Aberdeen. She was one of Byron’s Scotch cousins, though a very distant one; and there is hardly anything else to be said, except that he was a child and she was a child in their kingdom by the sea. Only no wind blew out of a cloud chilling her. Her mother made a second marriage—described by Byron as a “faux pas” because it was socially disadvantageous—and left the city; and the two children never met again.

It was of no importance, of course. They were only a little more than seven when they were separated. But Byron was proud of his precocity, and liked to recall it, and to wonder if any other lover had ever been equally precocious. “I have been thinking lately a good deal of Mary Duff,” he wrote in a fragment of a diary at the age of twenty-five; and he reminded himself how he used to lie awake, picturing her, and how he urged his nurse to write her a love letter on his behalf, and how they sat together—“gravely making love in our way”—while Mary expressed pity for her younger sister Helen, for not having an admirer too. Above all, he reminded himself of the shock which he felt, years afterwards, when the sudden communication of a piece of news revived the recollection of the idyll.

“My mother,” he proceeded, “used always to rally me about this childish amour; and, at last, many years after, when I was sixteen, she told me, one day, ‘Oh, Byron, I have had a letter from Edinburgh, from Miss Abercromby, and your old sweetheart Mary Duff is married to a Mr. C——.’ And what was my answer? I really cannot explain or account for my feelings at that moment; but they nearly threw me into convulsions, and alarmed my mother so much that, after I grew better, she generally avoided the subject—to me—and contented herself with telling it to all her acquaintance.”

And then again:

“My misery, my love for that girl were so violent that I sometimes doubt if I have ever been really attached since. Be that as it may, hearing of her marriage several years after was like a thunder stroke—it nearly choked me—to the horror of my mother and the astonishment and almost incredulity of nearly everybody.”

It is a well-known story, and one can add nothing to it beyond the fact that Mary Duff’s husband was Mr. Cockburn, the wine merchant, and that she lived quite happily with him, and that we are entitled to think of her whenever we drink a glass of Cockburn’s port. But we may also doubt, perhaps, whether Byron is, in this case, quite a faithful reporter of his own emotions, and whether his grief was not artistically blended with other and later regrets, and other and later perceptions of the fickleness of the female heart and the mutability of human things. For when we come to look at the dates, we find that the date of Mary Duff’s marriage was also the date of Byron’s desperate passion for Mary Chaworth.

Between Mary Duff and Mary Chaworth, however, Margaret Parker had intervened. She was another cousin, descended from Admiral Byron’s daughter Augusta. The first letter that Byron ever wrote was addressed to her mother. “Dear Madam,” it began, “My Mamma being unable to write herself desires I will let you know that the potatoes are now ready and you are welcome to them whenever you please.” For the rest, one can only quote Byron’s brief reminiscence:

“My first dash into poetry was as early as 1800. It was the ebullition of a passion for my first cousin Margaret Parker, one of the most beautiful of evanescent beings. I have long forgotten the verses, but it would be difficult for me to forget her—her dark eyes—her long eyelashes—her completely Greek cast of face and figure! I was then about twelve—she rather older, perhaps a year. She died about a year or two afterwards in consequence of a fall which injured her spine and induced consumption.... My sister told me that, when she went to see her, shortly before her death, upon accidentally mentioning my name, Margaret coloured through the paleness of mortality to the eyes.... I knew nothing of her illness, being at Harrow and in the country, till she was gone. Some years after I made an attempt at an elegy—a very dull one.”

And then Byron speaks of his cousin’s “transparent” beauty—“she looked as if she had been made out of a rainbow”—and concludes:

“My passion had its usual effect upon me—I could not eat—I could not sleep—I could not rest; and although I had reason to know that she loved me, it was the texture of my life to think of the time that must elapse before we could meet again, being usually about twelve hours of separation! But I was a fool then, and am not much wiser now.”

The elegy is included in the collected works. Special indulgence is asked for it on the ground that it was “composed at the age of fourteen.” It is very youthful in tone—quite on the conventional lines—as one would expect. A single quatrain may be given—not to be criticised, but merely to show that Byron, as a boy, was still looking at life pretty much as his pastors and masters told him to look at it:

“And shall presumptuous mortals Heaven arraign!
And, madly, Godlike Providence accuse!
Ah! no, far fly from me attempts so vain;—
I’ll ne’er submission to my God refuse.”

We are still a long way here from the intense, the cynical, the defiant, or even the posturing Byron of later years. The gift of personal expression has not yet come to him; and he is still in literary fetters, weeping, on paper, according to the rules. Intensity and the personal note only begin with his sudden love for Mary Chaworth; cynicism and defiance only begin after that love affair has ended in failure.

Mary Chaworth was the heir of the Annesley property, adjoining Newstead, and she was the grand-niece of the Chaworth whom the wicked Lord Byron ran through the body in the upper chamber of the Pall Mall tavern; so that their marriage, if they could have been married, would, as Byron says, “have healed feuds in which blood had been shed by our fathers.” But Byron was not yet the Byron who had only to come, and to be seen, in order to conquer. He was a schoolboy of fifteen, which is an awkward age. He had achieved no triumphs in any field which could give him self-assurance. He was not yet a leader, even among his schoolfellows; and he was not only lame, but also fat. How shall a fat boy hope, whatever fires of genius burn within him, to enter the lists against his elders and bear away the belle from county balls? Byron, at any rate, failed signally in the attempt to do so.

Newstead having been let to Lord Grey de Ruthen, Mrs. Byron was, at the time, lodging at Nottingham; and Byron had various reasons for preferring to see as little of her as possible. She was never sympathetic; she was often quarrelsome; it was her pleasant habit, when annoyed, to rattle the fire-irons and throw the tongs at him. So he often availed himself of his tenant’s invitation to visit Newstead, whenever he liked; and from Newstead it was the most natural thing in the world that he should go over to Annesley, where Miss Chaworth, with whom he already had a slight acquaintance, was living with her mother, Mrs. Clarke.

He was always welcome there. There was as little desire on his cousin’s side as on his to revive the recollection of the feud. When he came to call, he was pressed to stay and sleep. At first he refused, most probably from shyness, though he professed a superstitious fear of the family portraits. They had “taken a grudge to him,” he said, on account of the duel; they would “come down from their frames at night to haunt him.” But presently his fears, or his shyness, were conquered. He had seen a ghost, he said, in the park; and if he must see ghosts he might just as well see them in the house; so, if it was all the same to his hosts, he would like to stay.

He stayed, and was entranced with Mary Chaworth’s singing. He rode with her, and practiced pistol shooting on the terrace—more than a little pleased, one conjectures, to show off his marksmanship. He went with her—and with others, including a chaperon—on an excursion to Matlock and Castleton. A note, written long afterwards, preserves a memory of the trip:

“It happened that, in a cavern in Derbyshire, I had to cross in a boat (in which two people only could lie down) a stream which flows under a rock, with the rock so close upon the water as to admit the boat only to be pushed on by a ferryman (a sort of Charon) who wades at the stern, stooping all the time. The companion of my transit was M.A.C., with whom I had long been in love, and never told it, though she had discovered it without. I recollect my sensations, but cannot describe them, and it is as well.”

And no doubt Mary Chaworth encouraged the boy, amused at his raptures, enjoying the visible proof of her power, prepared to snub him, in the end, if necessary, but scarcely expecting that there would be any need for her to do so. She was seventeen, and a girl of seventeen always feels capable of reminding a boy of fifteen that the prayer book forbids him to marry his grandmother. Moreover, she was engaged, though the engagement had not yet been announced, to Mr. John Musters—a grown man and a Philistine—a handsome, rather dissipated, hard-riding and hard-drinking country squire. The dreamy, limping, fat boy from Harrow had no shadow of a chance against his athletic rival. It was impossible for Mary Chaworth to divine the genius that lurked beneath the fat. One has no right to expect such powers of divination from girls of seventeen.

No doubt she thought the fat boy, as she would have said, “good fun.” No doubt she was amused when, as a demonstration that he was not too young to be loved, he showed her the locket which Margaret Parker had given him, three years before, when he was twelve. Unquestionably she flirted with him—or, at least, let him flirt with her. She even gave him a ring, and the gift must have raised high hopes, though it was the cause of the discovery which brought the flirtation to an end.

Squire Musters discovered the ring among Byron’s clothes one day when he and the boy were bathing together in the Trent. He recognised it, picked it up, and put it in his pocket. Byron claimed it, and Musters declined to give it up; and then, to quote the Countess Guiccioli, who is the authority for the story:

“High words were exchanged. On returning to the house, Musters jumped on a horse and galloped off to ask an explanation from Miss Chaworth, who, being forced to confess that Lord Byron wore the ring with her consent, felt obliged to make amends to Musters by promising to declare immediately her engagement with him.”

Such is the story, as one gets it, through the Countess and through Moore, from Byron himself; but we also get a side glimpse at it in a letter, recently published,[2] from Mrs. Byron to Hanson, the family solicitor. From this we gather that Byron, in order to make love, had absented himself from school; that Drury had inquired the reason of his absence; and that his mother was making strenuous, but unavailing, efforts to induce him to return. Nothing was the matter with him but love—“desperate love, the worst of all maladies in my opinion.” He had hardly been to see his mother at all, but had been spending all his time at Annesley. “It is the last of all connexions,” she added, “that I should wish to take place”; and she begged Mr. Hanson to make arrangements for her son to spend his next holidays elsewhere. Expense was no object; and it would suit her very well if Dr. Drury could be induced to detain him at Harrow.

And Byron himself, meanwhile, was writing to his mother, alternately using lofty language about his right to choose his own friends, and pleading for one more day in order that he might take leave.

He took it; but there is more than one version of the story.

“Do you think,” he overheard Mary Chaworth say to her maid, “that I could care anything for that lame boy?” And, having heard that, “he instantly darted out of the house, and, scarcely knowing whither he ran, never stopped till he found himself at Newstead.” That is what Moore tells us; but the picture drawn in “The Dream,”—the most obviously and deliberately autobiographical of Byron’s poems—is different.

“She loved,” he writes:

“Another: even now she loved another,
And on the summit of that hill she stood
Looking afar as if her lover’s steed
Kept pace with her expectancy, and flew.”

She was waiting, that is to say, for Squire Musters to ride up the lane, while listening to Byron’s declaration. That is the first picture; and then there follows the picture of the boy who “within an antique oratory stood,” and to whom, presently, “the lady of his love re-entered”:

“She was serene and smiling then, and yet
She knew she was by him beloved—she knew,
For quickly comes such knowledge, that his heart
Was darkened with her shadow, and she saw
That he was wretched, but she saw not all.
He rose, and with a cold and gentle grasp
He took her hand; a moment o’er his face
A tablet of unutterable thoughts
Was traced, and then it faded, as it came;
He dropped the hand he held, and with slow steps
Retired, but not as bidding her adieu,
For they did part with mutual smiles; he passed
From out the massy gate of that old Hall,
And mounting on his steed he went his way;
And ne’er repassed that hoary threshold more.”

There we have the Mary Chaworth legend as it has been handed down from one generation of biographers to another. Byron, according to that legend, saw Mary once after her marriage, but once only. He was on the point of visiting her at a later date, but was dissuaded by his sister. “If you go,” Augusta said, “you will fall in love again, and then there will be a scene; one step will lead to another, et cela fera un éclat.” He agreed that the reasoning was sound, and did as he was advised. He tells that story himself, and adds: “Shortly after, I married.”

And yet—the legend continues—this hopeless love, which touched his heart at the age of fifteen, was the dominating influence of his life. Mary Chaworth, though always absent, was yet always present. He never loved any other woman, though he tried to love, and indeed seemed to love, several. The vision of her face always came between him and them. His later love affairs were only concessions, or attempts to escape from himself and his memories—unavailing attempts, for this memory continued to haunt him until the end.

It sounds incredible. The thoughts of youth may be long, long thoughts; but the memories of youth are short, and the dreams of youth are dreams from which we never fail to wake. And yet Byron insists, quite as much as biographers have insisted. He insists in “The Dream,” which was written more than a decade after the parting. He insists in later poems, the inner meaning of which is hardly to be questioned. So that speculation is challenged, and, when pursued, leads us inevitably to a dilemma.

For of two things, one: Either Byron was posing—posing not only to the world but to himself; or else the story, as all the biographers from Moore to Cordy Jeaffreson have told it, is incomplete, and after an interlude, had a sequel.

To search for such a sequel will be our task presently. Unless we can find one, the development of the personal note in Byron’s work will have to be left unexplained. The impression which we get, if we read the more personal poems in quick succession, is of a man who first awakes from the dream of love—and remains very wide awake for a season—and then relapses and dreams it all over again. Unless the story which first set him dreaming had had a sequel, that would hardly be. So we will seek for the sequel in due course, though we must first gather up the incidents of the interlude.

CHAPTER IV

LIFE AT CAMBRIDGE AND FLIRTATIONS AT SOUTHWELL

Baffled in love, Byron returned to Harrow, after a term’s absence, in January 1804, and remained there for another eighteen months. This eighteen months is the period during which he describes himself as having been happy at school. It is also the period during which he haunted the Harrow churchyard, indulging his day dreams as he looked down from the hillside on the wide, green valley of the Thames. Those dreams, it is hardly to be doubted, were chiefly of Mary Chaworth; and we may picture the poet’s secret sorrow as giving him, fat though he was, a sense of superiority over other boys who had no secret sorrows. Apparently, too, casting about for an explanation of his failure, he realised that, in the rivalries of love, the victory is far less likely to rest with the fat than with the lame; and so, presently,—though not until after an interval of reflection—he set himself the task of compelling his too solid flesh to melt.

He has been laughed at, and charged with vanity for doing so; but he was right. He would also have been ridiculed, and with more justice, if he had resigned himself to be overwhelmed by the rising tide of superabundant tissue. Fatness is not merely a grotesque condition. It is a condition incompatible with fitness; and it is far nobler to resist it with systematic heroism than to cultivate it and call heaven and earth to witness that one is the fattest person going; and the fact that Byron, by dint of exercises which made him perspire, a careful diet, and a persistent use of Epsom salts, reduced his weight from fourteen stone six to twelve stone seven, is no small achievement to be passed over lightly. It is, on the contrary, one of the most memorable incidents in his development—the greatest of all the feats performed by him at Trinity College, Cambridge,[3] where he began to reside in October 1805.

He did not read for honours. At Oxford he might have done so, and might have figured in the same class list as his Harrow friend, Sir Robert Peel, who took a double-first, and Archbishop Whately, who took a double-second. At Cambridge, however, the pernicious rule prevailed that honours were only for mathematicians. The Classical Tripos was not originated until a good many years afterwards, and Byron had neither talent nor taste for figures. The most notable, though not the highest, wranglers of his year were Adam Sedgwick, the geologist, and Blomfield, Bishop of London. Byron would have had to work very hard to make any show against them. He did not enter the competition, but let his mind exercise itself on more congenial themes, cherishing the belief—so erroneous and yet so common—that Senior Wranglers never come to any good in after life.

His allowance was £500 a year; and he kept a servant and a horse. His general proceedings, except when he was writing verses were pretty similar to those of the average young nobleman who attends a University, not to instruct but to amuse himself. He rode, and fenced, and boxed, and swam, and dived; he gambled and backed horses; he was alternately guest and host at rather uproarious wine-parties, and was spoken of as a young man “of very tumultuous passions.” The statement has been made—he has made it himself and his biographers have repeated it—that he lived quietly at first, and only latterly got into a dissipated set; but as we find him, in his second term, entreating his sister to back a bill for £800, the statement probably needs to be modified in order to square with the facts.

Apparently Augusta did not comply with his request; but the proofs that he lived beyond his means are ample. Mrs. Byron was as loud in her wail on the subject as the widows of Asher. She complains—this also in the second term—of bills “coming in thick upon me to double the amount I expected”; and she protests, in Byron’s first Easter vacation, against his wanton extravagance in subscribing thirty guineas to Pitt’s statue; while, in the course of the next Easter vacation we find her consulting the family solicitor as to the propriety of borrowing £1000 to get her son out of the hands of the Jews, and declaring that, during the whole of his Cambridge career he has done “nothing but drink, gamble, and spend money.”

Very similar is the testimony of his own and his sister’s letters. “I was much surprised,” Augusta writes, in the second term, to the solicitor, “to see my brother a week ago at the Play, as I think he ought to be employing his time more profitably at Cambridge.” Byron himself, writing to his intimates, confesses to several departures from sobriety. The first was in celebration of the Eton and Harrow match, which was followed by a convivial scene, foreshadowing those at the Empire on boat-race night, at some place of public entertainment. “How I got home after the play,” Byron says, “God knows. I hardly recollect, as my brain was so much confused by the heat, the row, and the wine I drank, that I could not remember in the morning how I found my way to bed.” Later, in a letter to Miss Elizabeth Bridget Pigot of Southwell, he speaks of his life as “one continual routine of dissipation,” talks of “a bottle of claret in my head,” and concludes with the specific admission: “Sorry to say been drunk every day, and not quite sober yet.”

Possibly he exaggerates a little; but those who know the Universities best will be least likely to suspect him of exaggerating very much. There is always a set which lives in that style at any college frequented by young men of ample means. Their ways, mutatis mutandis, are faithfully described in the pages of “Verdant Green.” Byron’s career, once more mutatis mutandis, was not unlike the career of Charles Larkyns and Little Mr. Bouncer in Cuthbert Bede’s picture of life at the sister University. He had, at any rate, one foot in such a set as that, though he was in a better set as well, and formed serious friendships with such men as Hobhouse, afterwards Lord Broughton, Charles Skinner Matthews, afterwards Fellow of Downing, Scrope Davies, afterwards Fellow of King’s, and Francis Hodgson, ultimately Provost of Eton. It is not quite clear whether he was, or was not, one of the rowdy spirits who “ragged” Lort Mansell, the Master of Trinity.[4] He certainly annoyed the dons by keeping a bear as a pet, and asserting that he intended the animal to “sit for a fellowship.” But the most characteristic picture, after all, is that which he draws (selecting his solicitor, of all persons in the world, for his confidant) of his mode of reducing his flesh.

“I wear seven waistcoats, and a great Coat, run and play cricket in this Dress, till quite exhausted by excessive perspiration, use the bath daily, eat only a quarter of a pound of Butcher’s Meat in 24 hours.... By these means my ribs display Skin of no great Thickness, and my clothes have been taken in nearly half a yard.”

That is the closing passage of a letter which begins with the confession that “Wine and women have dished your humble servant.” The two statements, taken in conjunction, furnish two-thirds of the picture. The remaining third of it may be deduced and constructed from the verses which Byron had then written or was then writing.

It might be tempting to see in the period of dissipation a disappointed lover’s desperate attempt to escape from an ineffaceable recollection; and the view might be supported by Byron’s own subsequent declaration that “a violent, though pure, love and passion,” was “the then romance of the most romantic period of my life.” Undergraduate excesses, however, rarely require such recondite explanations; and Byron’s reminiscences had, as we shall see, been coloured by intervening events. All the contemporary evidence that one can gather goes to show that they were inexact; that, though he had been hard hit by Mary Chaworth’s disdainful reception of his suit, he did not mope, but, holding up his head, was in a fair way to live his trouble down; and that his theory of himself, put forward in the well-known lines in “Childe Harold”:

“And I must from this land begone
Because I cannot love but one”

is an after thought entirely inconsistent with his practices as a Cambridge undergraduate.

One would be constrained to suspect that, even if the early poems addressed to Mary Chaworth stood alone. There are not many of them, and they lack the intensity of passion—the impression of all possible hopes irremediably blighted—which “The Dream” reveals. They strike one as a little stiff and artificial, as though the poet had tried to express, not so much what he actually felt, as what he considered that a man in his position ought to feel. That is particularly the case with the poems of the first period. There are boasts in them which we know to have been quite unwarranted by the circumstances of the case. The poet pictures himself as one who might disturb domestic peace if he chose, but refrains, being merciful as he is strong:

“Perhaps his peace I could destroy,
And spoil the blisses that await him;
Yet let my rival smile in joy,
For thy dear sake, I cannot hate him.”

The boasts there, we see, are the prelude of resignation; and, a line or two further on, resignation is followed by the resolution to forget:

“Then, fare thee well, deceitful Maid,
’Twere vain and fruitless to regret thee;
Nor Hope nor Memory yield their aid,
But Pride may teach me to forget thee.”

That is very conventional—hardly less conventional than the Elegy on Margaret Parker—a sentimental “prelude to life,” one would judge, of quite an ordinary kind. And, as has been said, the sentimental utterance does not stand alone. Other verses, hardly less sentimental, addressed to several other ladies, were, at the same time, pouring from Byron’s pen.

Burgage Manor, a house which his mother had taken at Southwell, near Nottingham, was his vacation home. He fled from his home, from time to time, because of Mrs. Byron’s incurable habit of rattling the fire-irons in order to draw attention to his faults; but he returned at intervals, and stayed long enough to form a considerable circle of friends—friends, be it noted, who belonged not to “the county” but to the professional society of the town.

The county did not “call” to any appreciable extent. A few of the men called on Byron himself; but none of the women called on Mrs. Byron—whether because her reputation for rattling the fire-irons and hurling the tongs had reached them, or because, on general principles, they did not think her good enough to mix with them. Byron, as was natural, resented their attitude and refused to return visits which implied a slight upon his mother. Whatever his own disputes with her, he would not have her snubbed by the local magnates, or himself enter their doors on sufferance while she was excluded from them. He mixed instead with the clergy, the doctors, the lawyers, the retired colonels, and flirted with their sisters and daughters. In that set he moved as a triton among the minnows, fluttering the dovecotes of Southwell pretty much as, at a later date, Praed, fresh from Eton, fluttered the dovecotes of Teignmouth. He could not dance, of course, owing to his lameness; but he could distinguish himself in amateur theatricals, and he could write verses.

His success in the Southwell drawing-rooms and boudoirs was the first reward of his success in resisting and repelling the encroachments of the flesh. The struggle was one which he had to renew at intervals throughout his life; but his “crowning mercy” was the victory of this date. He emerged from it slim, elegant, and strikingly handsome. He rejoiced, and the girls of Southwell rejoiced with him. They understood, as well as he did, that it is difficult for a man to be fat and sentimental at one and the same time; that there is something ludicrously incongruous in the picture of a fat boy writing sentimental verses and professing to pine away for love. And they liked him to write sentimental verses to them, and he was quite willing to do so. He was, at this time, the sort of young man who will write verses to any girl who will give him a keepsake—the sort of young man to whom almost every girl will give a keepsake on condition that he will write verses to her.

He wrote lines, for instance, “to a lady who presented to the author a lock of hair braided with his own and appointed a night in December to meet him in the garden.” Nothing is known of her except that her name was Mary, and that she was neither Mary Duff nor Mary Chaworth, but a third Mary “of humble station.” Southwell, when it saw those verses, was shocked. It seemed highly improper to Southwell that maidens of humble station should be encouraged to presume by such attentions on the part of noblemen. Probably it was on this occasion that the Reverend John Becher, Vicar of Rumpton, Notts, expostulated with the poet for

“Deigning to varnish scenes that shun the day
With guilty lustre and with amorous lay.”

But Byron kept Mary’s lock of hair, and showed it, together with her portrait, to his friends and wrote:

“Thro’ hours, thro’ years, thro’ time ’twill cheer—
My hope in gloomy moments raise;
In life’s last conflict ’twill appear,
And meet my fond, expiring gaze.”

To Mary Chaworth herself Byron could hardly have said more, but he was, in fact, at this time, saying the same sort of thing to all and sundry. Just the same sentiment recurs in the lines addressed “To a lady who presented the author with the velvet band which bound her tresses”:

“Oh! I will wear it next my heart;
’Twill bind my soul in bonds to thee:
From me again ’twill ne’er depart,
But mingle in the grave with me.”

Yet if Byron proposes to be faithful for ever to this un-named lady, he proposes, at the same time, to be equally faithful to a lady who can be identified as Miss Anne Houson:

“With beauty like yours, oh, how vain the contention!
Thus lowly I sue for forgiveness before you;—
At once to conclude such a fruitless dissension,
Be false, my sweet Anne, when I cease to adore you!”

And then there are other lines—innumerable other lines which would also have to be quoted if the treatment of the subject were to be encyclopædic—lines to Marion, lines to Caroline, lines to a beautiful Quaker, lines to Miss Julia Leacroft, whose brother, the fire-eating Captain John Leacroft remonstrated with Byron, and, according to Moore, even went so far as to challenge him, on account of his pointed attentions to his sister: lines, finally, to M.S.G. who would appear, if verse could be accepted as autobiography, to have offered to yield to Byron, but to have been spared because of his tender regard for her fair fame:

“I will not ease my tortured heart,
By driving dove-ey’d peace from thine;
Rather than such a sting impart,
Each thought presumptuous I resign.
“At least from guilt shalt thou be free,
No matron shall thy shame reprove;
Though cureless pangs may prey on me,
No martyr shalt thou be to love.”

With that citation we may quit the subject. Not one of the sets of verses—with the single exception of the set addressed to Miss Leacroft—has any discoverable story attached to it. All of them—or nearly all of them—have the air of celebrating some profound attachment from which no escape is to be looked for on this side of the grave. Byron’s later conception of himself as a man who had loved but one had not crept into his poetry yet. He had not even begun to strike the pose of the Childe impelled to “visit scorching climes beyond the sea” because the one he loved “could ne’er be his.”

The idea, indeed, of a man fleeing the country in 1809 because he had loved in vain in 1804 would not, in any case, carry conviction. Even to a poet the idea could hardly have presented itself without some definite renewal of the memories. They were revived, in fact, at a dinner party, in 1808, of which we find an account in one of Byron’s letters to Hodgson:

“I was seated near a woman to whom, when a boy, I was as much attached as boys generally are, and more than a man should be. I knew this before I went, and was determined to be valiant and converse with sang froid; but instead I forgot my valour and my nonchalance, and never opened my lips even to laugh, far less to speak, and the lady was almost as absurd as myself, which made both the object of more observation than if we had conducted ourselves with easy indifference. You will think all this great nonsense; if you had seen it, you would have thought it still more ridiculous. What fools we are! We cry for a plaything which, like children, we are never satisfied with till we break open, though, like them, we cannot get rid of it by putting it on the fire.”

That is the prose record of the meeting, and there is also a record in verse. There are lines “to a lady on being asked my reason for quitting England in the Spring”; there is the piece beginning, “Well! thou art happy”:

“Mary, adieu! I must away:
While thou art blest I’ll not repine;
But near thee I can never stay;
My heart would soon again be thine.”

And also:

“In flight I shall be surely wise,
Escaping from temptation’s snare;
I cannot view my Paradise
Without the wish of dwelling there.”

Poor stuff, as poetry, it will be agreed. Any one who wrote poetry at all might have written it. The sentiment rendered in it is just the sentiment which any sentimental youth would have felt to be proper to the occasion. We can find in it, at most, only the faint fore-running shadow of the Byronic pose. It rings very insincerely if we set it beside the lines in which Walter Savage Landor, at about the same period, commemorated a similar moment of emotion:

“Rose Aylmer, whom these waking eyes
May weep but never see;
A night of memories and of sighs
I consecrate to thee.”

In that comparison, most decidedly, all the advantage is with Landor—inevitably, because his were the feelings of a man, whereas Byron’s were the feelings of a boy. He was only twenty, and his age is the explanation of a good deal. It explains his startled timidity, described in the letter to Hodgson, in a novel, romantic situation. It explains his hugging his grief as a precious possession on no account to be let go. It also explains the zest with which, when grief had had its sacred hour, he could turn from it and throw himself into other activities.

He rejoiced in the pose, only outlined as yet, which was presently to make him the most interesting man (to women at all events) in Europe; but he also rejoiced in his youth. He flirted, as we have seen; he took part in amateur theatrical performances; he engaged energetically in most of the sports of the day, fencing with Angelo, boxing with Gentleman Jackson, swimming the Thames from Lambeth to the Tower; he accumulated debts with the fine air of a man heaping Pelion on Ossa; he flung down his defiant challenge to the literary bigwigs in “English Bards and Scotch Reviewers”; he drew his plans for the grand tour. The world, in short, was just then “so full of a number of things” that Mary Chaworth’s importance in it can easily be, as it has often been, exaggerated.

Presently we shall see Byron exaggerating it; and we shall also see how he came to do so—how the boy’s occasional pose became the determining reality of the man’s life. But before we come to that, we must turn back.

CHAPTER V

REVELRY AT NEWSTEAD—“ENGLISH BARDS AND SCOTCH REVIEWERS”

One watches the swelling of Byron’s indebtedness with morbid interest. It is like the rapid rising of a Spring tide which threatens to submerge a city. Already, in his second term at Cambridge, as we have seen, he besought his sister to pledge her credit for his loans. At the beginning of his third year, we find him making a confession to his solicitor:

“My debts amount to three thousand, three hundred to Jews, eight hundred to Mrs. B. of Nottingham, to coachmaker and other tradesmen a thousand more, and these must be much increased before they are lessened.”

They were increased before they were lessened—unless the explanation be that Byron only told the truth about them in instalments. Three months later this is his confession to the Reverend John Becher:

“Entre nous, I am cursedly dipped; my debts, everything inclusive, will be nine or ten thousand before I am twenty-one.”

But, even so, the high-water mark is not yet reached. Towards the end of the same year, when Byron is contemplating his “grand tour,” he once more calls his solicitor into council:

“You honour my debts; they amount to perhaps twelve thousand pounds, and I shall require perhaps three or four thousand at setting out, with credit on a Bengal agent. This you must manage for me.”

A pleasant commission, which seems to have led to a reference to Mrs. Byron, who made a luminous suggestion:

“I wish to God he would exert himself and retrieve his affairs. He must marry a woman of fortune this Spring; love matches is all nonsense. Let him make use of the Talents God has given him. He is an English Peer, and has all the privileges of that situation.”

It was a matter-of-fact proposal, worthy of the canny Scotswoman who made it—a proof that, even when she threw the tongs at her son, she still had his interests at heart; but nothing came of it. Very likely Byron, at this date knew no heiresses; and even his mother was not matter-of-fact enough to expect him to advertise for one, even for the purpose of avoiding the necessity of selling Newstead. There was still the resource of borrowing a little more, and of making the loans go as far as possible by retaining the money for personal expenses, instead of applying it to the payment of debt; and something of that sort seems to have been done. Scrope Davies lent Byron £4800; and yet Mrs. Byron had occasion to write:

“There is some Trades People at Nottingham that will be completely ruined if he does not pay them, which I would not have happen for a whole world.”

Moreover, though Byron himself talked vaguely to Hanson of the possibility of his marriage with “a golden Dolly,” he was at an age at which a young man does not readily marry any woman with whom he is not in love. Whether he was or was not, at that time, in love with Mrs. Chaworth,[5] he certainly was not in love with any one else; and he was enjoying himself and “having his fling,” after the manner of gilded youth. His “domestic female companion,” to use Gibbon’s charming phrase, was a professional daughter of joy who travelled about with him in male attire. He even brought her to Newstead, when he took possession of the Abbey on the expiration of Lord Grey de Ruthen’s tenancy. That may have been one reason—though it need not necessarily have been the only one—for his refusal to let his mother join him there. It would certainly have been a valid reason for postponing matrimony.

Around those Newstead revels a good deal of fantastic legend circles; and the facts concerning them are hardly to be disentangled from the myths. “Childe Harold” starts with them:—

Ah! me! in sooth he was a shameless wight,
Sore given to revel and ungodly glee;
Few earthly things found favour in his sight
Save concubines and carnal companie,
And flaunting wassailers of high and low degree.

“Childe Harold,” however, in spite of the fact that it was first called “Childe Buron,” is a poem, not a deposition. The picture, with its “Paphian girls” and the rest of it—

Where superstition once had made her den,
Now Paphian girls were wont to sing and smile,
And monks might deem their time was come agen,
If ancient tales say true, nor wrong these holy men,

is not necessarily faithful because the note of contrast which it sounds is of the essence of the poem. But, on the other hand, the excuses and explanations by means of which Moore and Cordy Jeaffreson attempt to palliate and minimise the supposed assertions of the poem are somewhat less than convincing.

The revels, say these apologists, cannot have been so very dreadful because the Newstead guests sometimes included some of the local clergy, and because some of the young men who engaged in them afterwards took orders. The obvious answer to that is that the revellers may very well have moderated their revelry on the occasions on which clergymen were present—and that those of them who afterwards became pillars of the Church may not, at that date, have got the old Adam into complete subjection. Nor is a great deal gained by the contention that the part of the supposed “Paphian girls” was, in fact, sustained by Byron’s “domestic female companion,” and by the Newstead cook and the Newstead housemaid. To say this is merely to protest that the alleged Paphians did not really come from Paphos, but from some other island in the same neighbourhood.

A letter written by Charles Skinner Matthews to his sister is the only contemporary chronicle of the proceedings. There is a confirmation of his account, together with some supplementary details, in a letter written, long afterwards, by Byron to John Murray. Remembering the ages and circumstances of the revellers—and remembering also that Moore’s information was derived from some of them—we will try to get as near to the truth as the procurable evidence allows.

Byron, one must always bear in mind, had not yet conquered his place in county society, or in what is now called “smart” society. His mother’s eccentricities and his guardian’s chilly attitude had, as we have seen, kept him out of it. He actually knew no peer who could or would introduce him when he took his seat in the House of Lords. The people whom he knew at home were chiefly provincial people of the professional classes. At Cambridge he had got into a fast, though not an unintellectual, set. He was very young, and he had plenty of credit, if not much ready money; and here was the “venerable pile” of Newstead—not the less venerable because it was dilapidated—at his disposal as a playground, and a place in which to dispense hospitality.

Naturally he wanted to show Newstead to his friends, whom he had never been able to entertain at home before. Naturally, having credit, he used it to fit up and furnish as much of Newstead as was necessary for their comfortable accommodation, not troubling to foresee the day—though he would not have had to look very far ahead in order to foresee it—when the bailiffs would be put in to seize the goods in default of payment. Naturally, as Mrs. Byron was so addicted to rattling the tongs and throwing the fire-irons at him, he did not want her there. Naturally, his college friends having fast tastes and habits, and no ladies of their own station being of the party, the method of their life did not follow the conventional round of the ordinary house-party. The pet bear, and the pet wolf, which guarded the entrances, were only symbols of the unusual and extravagant state of things within.

Breakfast, in theory, could be served at any hour. The hour actually preferred by the majority of the party was one P.M. Matthews, who generally came down between eleven and twelve, “was esteemed a prodigy of early rising.” Any one, he says, who had wanted to breakfast as early as ten “would have been rather lucky to find any of the servants up.” Not until two P.M., as a rule, was the breakfast cleared away. The amusements of the afternoon—which Matthews euphemistically calls the morning—were “reading, fencing, single-stick, or shuttle-cock, in the great room, practising with pistols in the hall, walking, riding, cricket, sailing on the lake, playing with the bear, or teasing the wolf.” Dinner was between seven and eight, and then—another euphemism most proper in a letter to a sister—“the evening diversions may be easily conceived.”

Those evening diversions consisted, in the first instance of dressing up and drinking. The beverages, according to Byron himself, were “burgundy, claret, champagne, and what not,” quaffed not only out of ordinary glasses, but also out of a loving-cup fashioned from a skull which had been dug up in the Newstead grounds. As for the dressing-up; “A set of monkish dresses,” says Matthews, “which had been provided, with all the proper apparatus of crosses, beads, tonsures, &c., often gave a variety to our appearance and to our pursuits,” which pursuits consisted, in Byron’s words, of “buffooning all round the house in our conventual garments.”

That Matthews speaks of tonsures as if they were articles of dress is neither here nor there; and there is no importance to be attached to his omission of all reference to the “buffooning.” We know from Hobhouse that he played his part in it, and that one of the amusements of this brilliant young Fellow of Downing was to hide himself in a stone coffin in the Long Gallery and groan, by way of alarming his brother revellers. Evidently the Monks of Newstead, while taking some hints from the profane members of the Medmenham Hell Fire Club, carried out, to the best of their ability, the traditions of the Monks of Thelema. “Fays ce que voudras” might have been their motto; and the doing of what they wished appears to have involved and included the extension of invitations to the cook and the housemaid to participate in their pleasures. Moore says so, not as one who makes a charge, but as one who makes an admission to rebut a graver charge, and is full of sympathy for the exuberance of lusty youth. Moralists must make what they can of the story, and apportion censure and indulgence as they think just.

The excesses, at any rate, whatever their degree and nature, did not fill Byron’s life. He was getting on with his poetry in spite of them, though it would be too much to say that he had yet proved his title to be called a poet.

“Hours of Idleness” had appeared while he was at Cambridge. The interest of that volume, nowadays, is far more biographical than poetical. When one has inferred from it that Byron did not pass through the University with a heart bowed down by the loss of Mary Chaworth, but flirted with a long series of the belles of Southwell, one has said nearly all that there is to say. The poems themselves, as the quotations given amply demonstrate, are no better than the general run of undergraduate verse composition. They are purely imitative; no new note rings in them. One is not surprised that Lord Carlisle, on receiving a presentation copy, was in a greater hurry to acknowledge than to read it, and merely remarked, in his acknowledgment that young men were better occupied in writing poetry than in devoting their valuable time to women and horses.

“Tolerably handsome,” was Byron’s first verdict on that letter; but he seems to have felt snubbed when he read it over a second time. Lord Carlisle’s opinions, he wrote to Miss Pigot, were nothing to him, but his guardian must not be “insolent.” If he were insolent, he should be gibbeted, just as Butler of Harrow had been gibbeted. In fact, and to sum up:

“Perhaps the Earl ‘bears no brother near the throne’—if so, I will make his sceptre totter in his hands.”

Which shows that Byron’s back was up, and that he was already in a fighting mood when the famous review in the Edinburgh introduced a jarring note into the chorus of approbation.

The author of the attack was not Jeffrey, as Byron thought, but Brougham. He had the excuse, for what it may be worth, that the poems had indubitably been over-praised because they had appeared under the signature of a nobleman. He, therefore, set out on the war path with the truculent air of a man whose conscience requires him to bludgeon a butterfly. The punishment, we cannot doubt, was very painful to the poet whom Cambridge undergraduates and Southwell belles had flattered; and the instant question for him was: Would he take his punishment lying down, or would he take it fighting?

That question, however, was not long in doubt. The Byrons were a fighting race; and the poet had inherited their love of fighting. Just as he had fought Lord Calthorpe at Harrow for calling him an atheist, so now he would fight the Edinburgh critic for calling him a fool. And he would fight him with his own weapons. Let him have three bottles of claret to prime him, and then he would strip for the fray, and would “take on,” not the reviewer only, but every one whom the reviewer had praised, and every one whom he himself disliked, or thought he might dislike if he knew him better. So he emptied his three bottles, and set to work on “English Bards and Scotch Reviewers,” and having written twenty lines of it, “felt better.”

It is the poem in which his genius first begins to be apparent. Most of the judgments expressed in it were unjust—most of them were afterwards retracted by their author; but that does not matter. One does not expect sound criticism from poets—least of all does one expect it from poets of one-and-twenty. The essence of the thing is that now, in “English Bards and Scotch Reviewers” a new personality spoke—and spoke loud enough to be heard.

The note of Byron—the note which gained him his large and attentive audience—was his reckless audacity. He was not afraid of saying things; he did not wrap them up, like Wordsworth and Coleridge, but said them in plain language which all the world could understand—said them, moreover, in a manner which made them appear true even to those who thought, or wished to think, them false. His readers never knew what he would be saying next. They only knew that, whatever it was, he would say it effectively, and, as has already been remarked, with the air of one who damned the consequences. That was the note which was, in later years, to ring through “Don Juan.” We can already hear it ringing, as it were in anticipation, through the couplets of “English Bards and Scotch Reviewers.”

Many examples might be cited; for the Satire, after the way of Satires, is almost entirely composed of damnatory clauses. Any piece of gossip was good enough for Byron to lay hold of and use as a missile when running amok among literary reputations. The best instance, however, may be found in the passage in which he turned and rent Carlisle.

His original intention was to make himself pleasant to his guardian. He had no particular reason for liking him, but he had no definite case against him. There was the letter, of course, in which Carlisle had patronised the poet instead of praising his poetry; but he had got over his irritation about that, and did not bear malice; and so he prepared for publication these lines of fulsome eulogy:

“Ah, who would take their titles from their rhymes?
On one alone Apollo deigns to smile,
And crowns a new Roscommon in Carlisle.”

But then, before the day of publication, occurred his quarrel with Carlisle. He thought that his guardian ought to have volunteered to introduce him when he took his seat in the House of Lords; he had the more reason for thinking so because his guardian was the only Peer of the Realm whom he knew. Carlisle, however, did not do so, contenting himself with instructing his ward as to the formalities to be fulfilled. The slight, whether intentional or not, was keenly felt—the more keenly because Byron was, at the moment, at war with all the world except Carlisle. Et tu, Brute, may very well have been his reflection.

So he had misjudged Carlisle. So Carlisle was as bad as other people—worse, indeed, because better things might reasonably have been expected from him. Very well. It was to be war between them, was it? Those who played at bowls must look out for rubbers. Carlisle should see what kind of an antagonist he had provoked. He had threatened to make his sceptre totter in his hands. Now he would show that he could do it. So he struck out the lines of eulogy, and substituted:

“Yet did or Taste or Reason sway the times,
Ah! who would take their titles with their rhymes!
Roscommon! Sheffield! With your spirits fled,
No future laurels deck a noble head;
No Muse will cheer with renovating smile
The paralytic puling of Carlisle.”

Such was the Parthian shaft; and Byron, having discharged it, shook the dust of England from off his feet, and departed on the grand tour.

CHAPTER VI

THE GRAND TOUR—FLIRTATIONS IN SPAIN

The glory has long since departed from the grand tour. We all take it nowadays, with less and less sense of adventure, and more and more expectation of home comforts. Sir Henry Lunn has pegged out the course, and stationed lecturers along it at intervals, to prevent us from confounding Scylla and Charybdis with Sodom and Gomorrah. They stir appropriate emotions in our breasts like stokers making up a fire. We play bridge in the evening on steamers “replete with every modern convenience”; and we are back again, in about six weeks, with a smattering of second-hand culture which goes the way of all smatterings in a very brief period of time. It is a shadowy, unreal, unsatisfactory business—a poor imitation of the grand tour as our forefathers knew it.

Some of them, no doubt, travelled frivolously and superficially. The Earl of Carlisle did so when he and Fox, as Samuel Rogers tells us, “travelled from Paris to Lyons for the express purpose of buying waistcoats and, during the whole journey, talked of nothing else.” But there was plenty of emotion in travel for those who cared for it—a real impression of a widening horizon on which unusual figures might be expected to appear—a sense of escaping from the familiar crowd and plunging into an unknown world in which anything might happen. The temptation was strong for the traveller of temperament to strike an attitude and say: “Behold me! The old moorings were impossible; the old lights gave no guidance. I prefer to be adrift on a strange sea, seeking I know not what. Travel is my escape from life. A woman tempted me, and tortured me, and so, unless a woman heals the wound a woman gave——”

Chateaubriand sought the Orient in that spirit. Disgust and disillusion, as he tells us, drove him forth. Pauline de Beaumont was dead, and Madame de Chateaubriand was a woman hard to live with. He needed the consolations of religion; he needed to meditate at the tomb of Christ. Above all he needed, when his meditations had fortified his mind, to meet Natalie de Noailles-Mouchy in the Court of the Lions at the Alhambra. He met her there, and travelled with her for three months in Spain, and presently found that he had only plucked yet another Dead Sea apple. And so he cried: “Behold me!” Similarly, in spite of the differences, with Byron.

It was a fixed article of faith with Chateaubriand that Byron had plagiarised his personality without acknowledgment. It was an act of envious vengeance, he said, for his own neglect to reply to a letter which Byron had written him while a schoolboy. That accusation, of course, is incredible and may be dismissed; but the resemblance between the two men was nevertheless as close as the differences of race allowed. Byron was as distinctly British, at intervals, as Chateaubriand was, at all times, distinctly French; and their points of view were to diverge widely as they grew older. Chateaubriand, an artistic Catholic, was to become one of the pillars of the Holy Alliance. Byron was to do more than any other man except Canning to pull the pillars of that temple down. But, in the meantime, the likeness was striking. There was about them both an equal air of cultivated gloom, an equal tendency to introspection, an equally intense interest in their personalities—that sense of the significance of the ego which was to be of the essence of the Romantic Movement—an equal readiness, as has been re-marked, to exclaim: Behold me!

The likeness is specially striking in the case of their journeys to the Orient. They sailed the same seas in the same spirit—with the one difference that Byron, who had a deadly hatred of certain kinds of hypocrisy, made no pretence in his quest for peace, of looking to and fro between love and religion. In both cases alike, disgust for life was understood to have given the impulsion to the journey. A leading incident in both journeys was, as Byron bluntly puts it, “a passion for a married woman.” Neither passion gave the lover any lasting satisfaction. Both passions were proclaimed in enigmatic pæans to the world.

The two cantos of “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage” which chronicle the journey are also the record of the beginning of the Byronic pose. The picture of the Childe is the picture of René, with a difference—the difference being that, whereas Chateaubriand could never, even in a work of art, depreciate himself, Byron rejoiced in doing so. For the rest, the Childe was “tameless and swift and proud,” and worthless, and weary, and disillusioned, and disgusted. He had “spent his days in riot most uncouth”: he had “felt the fulness of satiety.” It was well that he had not won the woman whom he loved because his kiss “had been polution unto aught so chaste.” His boon companions were only “flatterers of the festal hour,” and “none did love him, not his lemans dear.” Wherefore behold him, on the Lisbon packet, in flight from himself, and seeking his “escape from life.”

That is the picture; that, as perhaps it would be better to put it, is the pose. It was to become a sincere and natural posture before the end; but it is impossible, at this early stage, to take it very seriously. Byron would himself have been the first to repudiate the suggestion that such men as Matthews, Hobhouse, and Hodgson were “heartless parasites of present cheer.” He had more respect for Matthews than for any man of his acquaintance; Hodgson was to be his most regular correspondent, and Hobhouse the chosen companion of his journey. Moreover, he was only twenty-one—an age at which a young man is eager to see the world and needs no excuse for setting out to do so. His conception of himself as a forlorn exile impelled to wander because the world has betrayed and trifled with him is, in the main, a young man’s literary affectation.

An affectation, no doubt, for which certain realities had furnished a hint. The fear of impending pecuniary embarrassment may sometimes have given the sound of revelry a hollow ring. The sarcasm of the Edinburgh, though repaid in kind, had certainly left a thin skin sore. The icy politeness of Carlisle had chilled an expansive heart, and given Byron the impression that he was regarded as an intruder in his own domain. Conjoined with his mother’s nagging, it had made something of a three-cornered quarrel from which it was good to escape. He had also found himself more sentimental than he ought to be about Mary Chaworth. Here, at any rate, was something to exaggerate—a foundation of bad temper on which a superstructure of pessimism might be raised. Byron duly raised it, for literary purposes. But he had his high spirits as well as his low spirits; and the farewell lines which he sent from Falmouth to Hodgson suggest anything rather than a heart bowed down with woe.

“Now at length we’re off for Turkey,
Lord knows when we shall come back!
Breezes foul and tempests murky
May unship us in a crack.
But since life at most a jest is,
As philosophers allow,
Still to laugh by far the best is,
Then laugh on—as I do now.
Laugh at all things,
Great and small things,
Sick or well, at sea or shore;
While we’re quaffing,
Let’s have laughing—
Who the devil asks for more?—
Some good wine! and who would lack it,
Ev’n on board the Lisbon packet?”

Those verses, quite as much as “’Tis done, and shivering in the gale”—and much more than anything in “Childe Harold,”—indicate the frame of mind in which Byron wished his native land good-night. He was travelling with all the paraphernalia of the grand tourist—with more servants than he could afford, and with the hearty, matter-of-fact John Cam Hobhouse for his companion to keep him out of mischief. Whatever he fled from, adventure was what he was looking for—not only the adventures which belong to the exploration of barbarous countries, but also those which are to be encountered in the boudoirs of garrison towns.

He landed at Lisbon and went to Cintra. He rode across Spain to Seville and Cadiz. He proceeded to Gibraltar, to Malta, to Albania, to Athens, and thence to Smyrna and the Dardanelles. He returned to Athens, and spent some time in exploring the interior of Greece. That, in outline, was the itinerary; and there were two adventures of which the letters to Hodgson show him to have been particularly proud. He swam the Hellespont, in imitation of Leander—a feat of which he boasts, over and over again, in every letter to every correspondent—and he indulged in “a passion for a married woman at Malta.”

Nor was that his only passion. If it was the only passion which he felt—which is doubtful—it certainly was not the only passion which he inspired. “Lord Byron,” says Hobhouse, in his matter-of-fact way, “is, of course, very popular with all the ladies, as he is very handsome, amusing, and generous; but his attentions to all and sundry generally end, as on this occasion, in rixæ femininæ.” We shall come to that story in a moment. It is preceded by a story of which the hint is in the lines beginning:

“Yet are Spain’s maids no race of Amazons,
But formed for all the witching arts of love:”

a story of which the memory is in “Don Juan”:

“’Tis pleasing to be schooled in a strange tongue
By female lips and eyes—that is I mean,
When both the teacher and the taught are young,
As was the case, at least, where I have been.”

It happened at Seville, where the travellers, as Hobhouse writes, “made the acquaintance of Admiral Cordova, with whose daughter Byron contrived to fall in love at very short notice.”

Admiral Cordova was the Admiral who put up the fight which gained Sir John Jervis the title of Earl Saint Vincent. Byron had an introduction to the family, met Señorita Cordova at the theatre, and was invited to escort her home. It is not quite clear from the correspondence whether it was Señorita Cordova or some other lady who quarrelled with him because he would not give her the ring which he wore, as pledge of his affection; nor is it certain whether the ring was, or was not, a memento of Mary Chaworth. Whatever its origin, it was to be yielded up at the hour of the “passion for a married woman”; and meanwhile there was another little incident of which Byron speaks, of all places in the world, in a letter to his mother:

“We lodged in the house of two Spanish unmarried ladies.... The eldest honoured your unworthy son with very particular attention, embracing him with great tenderness at parting ... after cutting off a lock of his hair, and presenting him with one of her own, about three feet in length, which I send and beg you will retain till my return.... She offered me a share of her apartment, which my virtue induced me to decline.”

That is all, and it is of no importance. The next stage was Gibraltar, and it is there, and on the voyage thence to Malta, that we get our first glimpse of Byron from the pen of an observer who observed, not as a matter of course, but as a matter of curiosity, and had a turn for picturesque description.

John Galt, afterwards famous as a Scotch novelist, was at Gibraltar when Byron arrived there. He had been sent to the Levant by a firm of traders to ascertain how far British goods could be exploited in defiance of the Berlin and Milan Decrees. He was to try hard, though in vain, to introduce such goods into the Greek archipelago, and to smuggle them into Spain. Half man of action and half dreamer, he went about denouncing priests and kings, and exhorting the British Government to seize all the islands everywhere for the supposed advantage of British commerce. Byron, condescendingly asking Hodgson to review one of his books favourably, describes him, with more or less of justice, as “a cock-brained man,” and, remembering him at a later date, told Lady Blessington that he “could not awe him into a respect sufficiently profound for my sublime self, either as a peer or an author.”

This means, of course, that Galt, though he perceived the pose, did not abase himself in ecstasy before it. Seeing that he was a man of thirty, whereas Byron was only just of age, it was hardly to be expected that he would. Moreover, as a Scotsman, he would naturally take the side of the Edinburgh and maintain that Byron had done nothing to be conceited about. So he observed Byron—and we may be grateful to him for doing so—in a spirit of criticism and detachment.

“His physiognomy,” Galt writes, “was prepossessing and intelligent, but ever and anon his brows lowered and gathered; a habit, as I then thought, with a degree of affectation in it, probably first assumed for picturesque effect and energetic expression, but which I afterwards discovered was undoubtedly the occasional scowl of some unpleasant recollection: it was certainly disagreeable—forbidding—but still the general cast of his features was impressed with elegance and character.”

That was the first impression, and the second impression was not more favourable:

“In the little bustle and process of embarking their luggage, his lordship affected, as it seemed to me, more aristocracy than befitted his years or the occasion; and I then thought of his singular scowl, and suspected him of pride and irascibility. The impression that evening was not agreeable, but it was interesting; and that forehead mark, the frown, was calculated to awaken curiosity and beget conjectures.”

Galt, in short, contrasted Byron unfavourably with Hobhouse, whom he found “a cheerful companion” and “altogether an advantageous specimen of a well-educated English gentleman;” but it was Byron who intrigued him. He noticed what Byron ate—“no animal food, but only bread and vegetables”—and he reflected that “he had not acquired his knowledge of the world by always dining so sparingly.” He even found his way “by cautious circumvallations into his intimacy”—though not very far into it, for “his uncertain temper made his favour precarious”; and finally we find him, as if in return for this precarious favour, drawing a picture of Byron which really can be called Byronic. The scene is the ship which conveys them both from Gibraltar to Malta:

“When the lights were placed, he made himself a man forbid, took his station on the railing between the pegs on which the sheets are belayed and the shrouds, and there, for hours, sat in silence, enamoured, it may be, of the moon. All these peculiarities, with his caprices, and something inexplicable in the cast of his metaphysics, while they served to awaken interest, contributed little to conciliate esteem. He was often strangely rapt—it may have been from his genius; and, had its grandeur and darkness been then divulged, susceptible of explanation; but, at the time, it threw, as it were, round him the sackcloth of penitence. Sitting amidst the shrouds and rattlings, churming an inarticulate melody, he seemed almost apparitional, suggesting dim reminiscences of him who shot the albatross. He was as a mystery in a winding sheet, crowned with a halo.”

One quotes the passage in full because it is the earliest coloured picture of the theatrical Byron—the fatal man of gloom and splendour on whom so much limelight was presently to be thrown. Whether Byron was posing for Galt—or whether Galt magnified the pose in the light of subsequent events—it is, of course, at this date, impossible to say. Perhaps both things happened, and the picture owes a little to each of them. At all events the beginning of Byronism—of the outward, visible Byronism, that is to say—is there. It is just the picture which we feel we have a right to look for of the fatal man divining the doom which he is unable to resist—alone in the midst of the crowd—his own personality creating a void around him—proceeding to his first “passion for a married woman.”

That passion awaited him as soon as he landed at Malta. The woman who inspired it was Mrs. Spencer Smith—the “Florence” of “Childe Harold:”

“Sweet Florence! could another ever share
This wayward, loveless heart, it would be thine.”

But Mrs. Spencer Smith has a story of her own which it is worth while to turn aside and tell.

CHAPTER VII

FLORENCE SPENCER SMITH

Mrs. Spencer Smith was the daughter of an Austrian Ambassador and the wife of an English Minister Plenipotentiary. “Married unhappily, yet has never been impeached in point of character,” says Byron in a letter to his mother. There are no details forthcoming about that, however. All that one can affirm is that her husband only appears as a shadowy figure in the background of her adventures, leaving the leading rôle to other men, while he serves his country at the other end of Europe.

He was a younger brother of Sir Sidney Smith, who had checked Napoleon’s victorious career at Acre. Napoleon, it is said by some French writers, loathed the very name of Smith after that calamity, held all the Smiths jointly and severally responsible for it, and swore to wreak his vengeance on the first Smith who fell into his hands. Consequently, the same writers add, when he heard that a Mrs. Smith was staying at Venice—a city then in his power—he felt that his long-delayed hour of triumph had come, and gave his orders accordingly.

That version of the story, however, is too good to be true. Mrs. Spencer Smith, in fact, was suspected, whether rightly or wrongly, of having played some part, as a secret agent, in some conspiracy against Napoleon. She had been betrayed, or denounced; she was being watched; and she walked, unaware of her danger, into the snare that had been set. Venice, it had seemed to her, would be a safe place of refuge when the over-running of northern Italy by the French armies made it awkward for her to remain at the Baths of Valdagno, where she had been staying for the benefit of her health. Her sister, Countess Attems, lived at Venice, and she went to visit her.

She was young, accomplished, beautiful—“like one of those apparitions,” says the Duchesse d’Abrantès, “which come to us in our happiest dreams.” She spoke seven languages, and looked down demurely—“a habit,” the Duchesse d’Abrantès continues, “which only added to her charms.” A Sicilian boy of twenty, the Marquis de Salvo, begged for an introduction, was presented, and fell in love. He had hardly done so—he had not even declared himself—when he lighted upon his chance of proving his devotion by rendering help in time of trouble.

General Lauriston, Napoleon’s aide-de-camp, arrived at Venice with a commission to act as Military Governor in his pocket; and then the trouble began. Mrs. Spencer Smith was sent for by the Chief of Police and requested to leave the town and take a residence in the country. She had hardly begun to look for one when there arrived four gendarmes, with the intimation that she was to remain in her apartment, and that they were to see that she did so. The Marquis de Salvo then volunteered to call on the Chief of Police and inquire the meaning of this rigorous measure. The Chief of Police first talked vaguely to him about Napoleon’s prejudice against the name of Smith, and then hinted that there might be more specific reasons for his severity. He added that his orders were to conduct Mrs. Smith under an escort to Milan; “and I rather fancy,” he concluded, “that she is to be detained in the fortress of Valenciennes.”

That was the boy’s chance. He was a boy in years, but a man in courage and resource. He ran to Mrs. Spencer Smith, repeated what he had been told, and promised that he would save her.

At first she hesitated. He would be taking a risk, she said, which he had no right to take. He probably expected a reward which her “principles” would not permit her to grant. But the boy, as it happened, was as chivalrous as he was brave. Perhaps he loved noble actions for their own sake. At all events he loved adventure; and here was the prospect of an adventure such as rarely comes the way of a youth fresh from school. As for the risks, he said, he did not fear them. As for reward, he would not ask for any. If Mrs. Spencer Smith would let him save her she should be saved. He had thought the matter out, and made his plans. All that was necessary was that she should take a maid with her whom she could trust. Everything else might be left to him.

Then Florence Spencer Smith thanked Salvo, and promised to accept his aid. She too was of the age at which one is grateful to life for adventures; and, if she must choose between the two evils, well then she would rather be compromised than locked up. So she made sure of her maid, and got into the carriage which the gendarmes provided. There were five of them, including the brigadier; and Salvo sought, and obtained, leave to ride with them in the vague character of “friend of the family.” The gendarmes, he found, were excellent fellows, quite unsuspicious, and very sympathetic. The brigadier was specially sympathetic because he was lost in admiration of Mrs. Smith’s faithful maid; and Salvo, having carefully thought out his coup, watched all the chances.

It had been agreed that Mrs. Smith should plead ill health, and ask to be allowed to journey by short stages. No objections were raised—probably because of the pleasure which the brigadier took in the society of the maid—and the party halted, first at Verona, and then at Brescia. At Verona nothing could be done. An Italian friend, whom Salvo implored to meet and help him, failed to keep the appointment, guessing why he was wanted, and fearing Napoleon’s long arm. He must, therefore, act alone; and the question was whether he could find a means of getting Mrs. Smith on board a boat and across the Lake of Garda. Probably he could if he could first see her alone and concert a scheme with her. So he galloped off to the lake side, hired two boats, and bought a post chaise, in which he proposed to drive Mrs. Smith up into the mountains, and over the frontier into Austria. Then he galloped back, told the brigadier that he was obliged to return to Venice, and begged to be allowed to say good-bye to Mrs. Smith without witnesses.

The brigadier, who liked to be alone with the maid, could quite understand that the marquis liked to be alone with the mistress. He winked a wicked eye, called the marquis “a sad dog,” and gave permission. Salvo winked back at him, as if admitting the impeachment of sad doggedness, and, in the brief interview which the brigadier supposed to be consecrated to sentiment, told Mrs. Smith what he had plotted, and how she herself must act.

He would return, after night-fall, with a rope ladder. In order to avoid the suspicions of the inquisitive, he would make that rope ladder with his own hands. He would pack it up into a parcel, and Mrs. Smith must lower a piece of string with which to draw it up. The parcel would also contain a boy’s costume, as a disguise for her, and a dose of laudanum with which to drug the maid’s evening drink in case she were not a party to the conspiracy. He would come again at eleven, wearing a cocked hat, and enveloped in a military cloak. Mrs. Smith, understanding who was there, must then make the ladder fast and climb down to him.

He came; and things happened more or less as he had planned them. The maid, in particular, was magnificently loyal. She offered to attend her mistress in her flight; and, when told that that could not be, she handed out her mistress’ jewels, helped in securing the ladder to the verandah, promised to remove it after it had served its purpose, and then tossed off the soporific of her own accord, so that it might be physically impossible for her to answer questions for some hours to come—incidentally also, no doubt, in order to give the brigadier the excuse which he would naturally desire for acquitting her of all complicity in the escape.

Mrs. Smith descended the ladder half way, and then fell off it; but Salvo had expected that. He caught her in his arms, and they got into their carriage and were off. The gates of the town were closed; but Salvo bluffed his way through them in an instant, with the help of his military cloak and head-gear.

“What in thunder do you mean by keeping me waiting? I’m the colonel of the twenty-fifth. You were warned to look out for me. You’ll hear of this again, my man. Open the gate at once, and let me through.”

Thus the boy swore in the full-blooded military style of the period. The gate was thrown open for him with profound apologies. He whipped up the horses, and galloped to Salona, where the boats were ready. They embarked, taking their carriage with them, and crossed to Riva. There they got into the carriage again, and galloped on to Trent, where a sleepy official, much in wrath at this disturbance of his slumbers, proceeded to make trouble about their passports, which were only approximately in order. The only course, since time pressed, and pursuers were on their track, was to leave the chaise behind and slip away surreptitiously in a country cart which an inn-keeper offered to sell them.

The pursuers, indeed, were hard upon their heels; but happily the morning sun was in their eyes. The fugitives saw them before they were seen, and drove their cart down from the mountain road through the forest to the torrent, so that the horsemen missed them and rode past them. After that, they abandoned their cart, and travelled by cross country roads and mountain paths, continually in peril of arrest, but always escaping as if by a miracle. A peasant, to whom they appealed for food and shelter, proposed to conduct them to the nearest police station, but was melted to tenderness by Mrs. Smith’s tears and pitiful entreaties. They read the offer of a reward for their capture posted on the walls. They hid themselves for two days in a mountain chapel. They were stopped, and questioned, and mistaken for other more romantic fugitives—an Italian Princess who was said to have eloped with an Italian bookseller’s assistant. They disguised themselves as peasants, and travelled in the midst of the real peasants’ flocks of sheep. Not until after many days’ wanderings did they reach Austrian territory, declare their true identity, and claim the protection of the law; and even so their troubles were not over.

Austria, at that date, had not yet recovered either morally or materially from the shock of Austerlitz, and dared not stand openly between Napoleon and his prey. The fugitives had to be arrested before they could be saved. Salvo was, for a while, locked up, like a criminal, in the deepest dungeon of a Styrian Castle; and Mrs. Smith was smuggled out of the country, under the name of Frau Müller—first to Riga, and thence to England, where Salvo ultimately joined her. Queen Charlotte thanked him publicly for the service so gallantly rendered to a British subject; and he made his best bow and withdrew, remembering his promise to expect no other recompense.

Such is the story of Mrs. Smith’s adventure as told, first by Salvo himself, who wrote a book about it, and then by the Duchesse d’Abrantès, who devoted a long section of her Memoirs to it. One repeats it, partly for its own sake and partly because the romance of it explains how the heroine of it appealed to Byron’s imagination.

She was the first really interesting—or, at all events, the first really remarkable—woman whom he had met. The women whom he had previously known had been very conventional young persons of the upper middle classes. Even Mary Chaworth had been bourgeoise, or must have seemed so in comparison with Mrs. Spencer Smith. To meet her was to encounter, for the first time, the amazing realities of life, and to find more romance in them than even a poet dared to dream of without reality to prompt him. And she was married, and it made no difference—or none except that, being married, she had more liberty, and could be more audacious than a spinster. “Since my arrival here,” Byron writes—still to his mother—“I have had scarcely any other companion.” There is an unmistakable note of self-complacency in the confession. Byron’s “passion for a married woman” was evidently signalling to him, as such a passion has signalled to many a young man before and after him, that, now at last, he was grown up.

Galt says that the attachment was merely “Platonic.” Possibly Galt was right, though his evidence goes for nothing, seeing that Byron looked down upon him from far too Olympian a height to be in the least likely to confide in him. The impression which Mrs. Spencer Smith, from the little that we know about her, gives is that of the type of the favourite heroine of Mr. Henry Arthur Jones’ more serious plays—a woman, that is to say, who shows herself of a very “coming-on” disposition until a certain point is reached, but then stops suddenly short, being frightened and abashed by her own temerity. She asked Byron for his ring—the ring which the Spanish lady had asked him for in vain—and he gave it to her. “Soon after this I sailed for Malta, and there parted with both heart and ring,” is his own way of putting it; and as Galt knew that she had got the ring, there seem to be grounds for the conjecture that she showed it and boasted of it.

Anything else, however, it would be idle to conjecture, even though we have “Childe Harold” and sundry “Lines” to help us in the quest.

The suggestion in “Childe Harold” is that Mrs. Spencer Smith made love to Byron in vain:

“Fair Florence found, in sooth, with some amaze,
One who, ’twas said, still sighed to all he saw,
Withstand, unmoved, the lustre of her gaze——”

The suggestion in the “Lines” is different:

“Oh, lady! When I left the shore,
The distant shore which gave me birth,
I hardly thought to grieve once more,
To quit another spot on earth:
“Yet, here amidst this barren isle,
Where panting Nature droops the head,
Where only thou art seen to smile,
I view my parting hour with dread.”

We must make what we can of that; and it really matters very little what we make of it. This “passion for a married woman” was an inevitable stage of the sentimental pilgrimage. Byron was bound to halt there for a little while, if not for long; and it was not to be expected that he would, like Ulysses, stuff his ears with wool while passing the Siren’s Isle. That is not the way of poets, and that is not the way of youth. He was bound, too, to fancy, for a moment, that the passion meant a great deal to him, even though, in fact, it meant but little; for that also is the way of youth and poets. And hardly less inevitable, though both of them knew that no hearts were being broken was the idea that Fate was cruel to decree their parting, and that, while they acted wisely, they must also suffer for their wisdom. And therefore:

“Though Fate forbids such things to be,
Yet by thine eyes and ringlets curled!
I cannot lose a world for thee,
But would not lose thee for a World.”

And therefore again, just two months later:

“The spell is broke, the charm is flown!
Thus is it with Life’s fitful fever:
We madly smile when we should groan;
Delirium is our best deceiver.
Each lucid interval of thought
Recalls the woes of Nature’s charter;
And He that acts as wise men ought,
But lives—as Saints have died—a martyr.”

That is all; and the story which the lines half cover up and half disclose is clearly of very little consequence. Mrs. Smith had enjoyed her flirtation, and had had verses written to her—much better verses than had been addressed to any of the belles of Southwell. Byron had posed, not knowing for certain whether he posed or not, had undergone a necessary experience, and had passed through the fire unhurt. The experiences which were really to matter to him were yet to come—though not immediately; and he had hardly finished writing verses to Mrs. Spencer Smith when he began writing verses to the Maid of Athens.

CHAPTER VIII

THE MAID OF ATHENS—MRS. WERRY—MRS. PEDLEY—THE SWIMMING OF THE HELLESPONT

“Maid of Athens, ere we part,
Give, oh give me back my heart!”

It would be superfluous to quote more of the poem than that; and it would be absurd to attach importance to the episode which it commemorates.

Byron came to Athens after an expedition, with Hobhouse, into the heart of Albania. He was, according to Hobhouse’s Diary, “all this time engaged in writing a long poem in the Spenserian stanzas,” the poem being, of course, the first canto of “Childe Harold.” That the travellers roughed it a good deal is evident from Hobhouse’s description of a supper whereat “Byron, with his sabre, cut off the head of a goose which shared our room with a collection of pigs and cows, and so we got an excellent roast.” He was much pleased with his reception by Ali Pasha, who said “he was certain I was a man of birth because I had small ears, curling hair, and little white hands.” He was also, at the same time, brooding on his “passion for a married woman,” and no doubt felt himself years older in consequence of that passion; and then, arriving at Athens, he fell in love, or fancied or pretended that he was in love, with his landlady’s daughter.

That was the social status of the Maid of Athens. Her mother, Theodora Macri, the widow of a former British Vice-Consul, had been reduced to letting lodgings—a sitting-room and two bedrooms, looking on to a courtyard, much patronised by English travellers, and highly recommended by them. There were three daughters, and there are passages in Byron’s letters which might be read to mean that he was equally in love with all of them. “An attachment to three Greek girls” is his summary of the incident to Hodgson; but he distinguished one of them by the special homage of a poem destined to be one of the most famous in the English language, with the result that Theresa Macri, Maid of Athens, became an institution, and that subsequent lodgers made much of her, looking for a romance where there had, in fact, been little more than the formal salute of the ships passing in the night. Hugh W. Williams, the artist, who was at Athens in 1817, depicts them for us: