the Brig of Don, beautiful in itself, is invested, by his mere mention of it, with an additional charm. Two or three years since, the sum of five pounds was offered to a person in Aberdeen, for a letter which he had in his possession, written by Captain Byron, a few days before his death; and, among the memorials of the young poet, which are treasured up by individuals of that place, there is one which it would have not a little amused himself to hear of, being no less characteristic a relic, than an old China saucer, out of which he had bitten a large piece, in a fit of passion, when a child." It was in the summer of 1798, that Lord Byron, then in his eleventh year, left Scotland with his mother and nurse, to take possession of the ancient seat of his ancestors. Never again saw he Scotland-but in his dreams. Never again saw Scotland the glorious being whom she had nursed-not in vain-throughout the passions of his precocious childhood -on her maternal breast. But 'tis glory and delight sufficient to herfor one age-to have had one great Poet-whose feet have seldom strayed, and his spirit never, from her glens and mountains. One era of the boy Byron's Life, then, we have seen depicted from such scanty-yet speaking scraps as Mr Moore has been able to collect from authentic sources, and he has presented them in a shape, and spoken of them in a spirit, in every way worthy of a man of genius. gaiety of spirit with which he used to take revenge on his tormentor, Lavender, by exposing and laughing at his pompous ignorance. Among other tricks, he one day scribbled down on a sheet of paper, all the letters of the alphabet, put together at random, but in the form of words and sentences, and, placing them before this all-pretending person, asked him gravely, what language it was. The quack, unwilling to own his ignorance, answered confidently, Italian,' to the infinite delight, as it may be supposed, of the little satirist in embryo, who burst into a loud triumphant laugh at the success of the trap which he had thus laid for impos ture. "With that mindfulness towards all who had been about him in his youth, which was so distinguishing a trait in his character, he, many years after, when in the neighbourhood of Nottingham, sent a message, full of kindness, to his old instructor, and bid the bearer of it tell him, that, beginning from a certain line in Virgil, which he mentioned, he could recite twenty verses on which he well remembered having read with this gentleman, when suffering all the time the most dreadful pains." About this time, according to his nurse, May Gray, he exhibited symptoms of a tendency towards rhyming -thus rallying an old lady who had insulted him, and who had a certain queer creed respecting a future state. able credit-and are about on a par If original, the lines do him consider with the common run of the satirical In Nottingham county their lives at Swan As curst an old lady as ever was seen; will be soon, She firmly believes she will go to the moon. Byron was now placed in Nottingham under the care of a quack called Lavender, who professed to cure such cases of lameness; and his system was to rub the foot over for a considerable time with handfuls of oil, to twist the limb forcibly round, and screw it up in a wooden machine. Meanwhile, the patient took lessons in Latin from a respectable The summer following, (1799,) Mrs schoolmaster, Mr Rogers, with whom Byron removed her boy to London, he read Virgil and Cicero, unmoved where he was put under the care of by torture which proved him a true Stoic. "It makes me uncomforta- mained under the tuition of the late Dr Bailey; and for two years he reble," said Mr Rogers one day to him, excellent Dr Glennie at Dulwich. to see you sitting there in such There he attended well to his studies pain as I know you must be suffer--and would have attended to them ing."-" Never mind, Mr Rogers," answered the heroic boy, "you shall see no signs of it in me.' "This gentleman, who speaks with the most affectionate remembrance of his pupil, mentions several instances of the still better but for Mrs Byron, who continued to interfere with and thwart the progress of his education in every way that a fond, wrong-headed mother could devise. Alecto, as her son used afterwards occasionally to call her, would sometimes turn Dr Glennie's house topsy-turvy, on the Doctor's refusing to grant unnecessary holidays-and the worthy man had one day the pain of overhearing a schoolfellow of his noble pupil say to him, "Byron, your mother is a fool;" to which the other answered, gloomily, "I know it." While at Dulwich, his reading in history and poetry was far beyond the usual standard of his age; and the Doctor does not doubt that he had more than once perused from beginning to end a set of our poets from Chaucer to Churchill, to which he had continual access. "He was, too," the Doctor pointedly writes, "playful, good tempered, and beloved by his companions." It was possibly during one of the vacations of this year, that the boyish love for his cousin, Miss Parker, to which he attributes the glory of having first inspired him with poetry, took possession of his fancy. "My first dash into poetry," he says, "was as early as 1800. It was the ebullition of a passion for my first cousin, Margaret Parker, (daughter and granddaughter of the two Admirals 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. Her sister Augusta (by some thought still more beautiful) died of the same malady; and it was, indeed, in attending her, that Margaret met with the accident which occasioned her own death. My sister told me, that when she went to see her, shortly before her death, upon accident. ally mentioning my name, Margaret coloured through the paleness of mortality to the eyes, to the great astonishment of my sister, who (residing with her grandmother, Lady Holderness, and seeing but little of me for family reasons) knew nothing of our attachment, nor could conceive why my name should affect her at such a time. 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. "I do not recollect scarcely any thing equal to the transparent beauty of my cousin, or to the sweetness of her temper, during the short period of our intimacy. She looked as if she had been made out of a rainbow-all beauty and peace. "My passion had its usual effects upon me-I could not sleep-I could not eat -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 which 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!" He had been nearly two years under the tuition of Dr Glennie, when his mother, unreasonably dissatisfied with the slowness of his progress, took him away,-and in his fourteenth year, he was consigned by Mr Manson, his solicitor, to the care of the Rev. Dr Drury, at Harrow, where he remained till, in 1805, he went to Cambridge. Harrow, for the first year and a half, he hated; for he was of a shy disposition then as ever; but the activity and energy of his nature soon conquered that repugnance. During the other years of his stay there, from being a most unpopular boy," he rose at length to be a leader in all the sports, schemes, and mischief of the school-at all times cricketing, rowing, and rebelling. The general character which he bore among the masters at Harrow, was that of an idle boy, who would never learn any thing; and, as far as regarded his tasks in school, this reputation was not ill founded. "But notwithstanding his backwardness in the mere verbal scholarship, on which so large and precious a portion of life is wasted, in all that general and miscellaneous knowledge, which is alone useful in the world, he was making rapid and even wonderful progress. With a mind too inquisitive and excursive to be imprisoned within statutable limits, he flew to subjects that interested his already manly tastes, with a zest which it is in vain to expect that the mere pedantries of school could inspire; and the irregular, but ardent, snatches of study which he caught in this way, gave to a mind like his an impulse forwards, which left more disciplined and plodding competitors far behind. The list, indeed, which he has left on record of the works, in all departments of literature, which he thus hastily and greedily devoured before he was fifteen years of age, is such as almost to startle belief,-comprising as it does, a range and variety of study, which might make much older helluones libro- fully within himself, and give way to rum' hide their heads." "My school friendships," he himself says, were with me passions;" and it would appear that he generally began them by thrashing their objects. "At Harrow, I fought my way very fairly. I think I lost but one battle out of seven; and that was to H; and the rascal did not win it, but by the most unfair treatment in his own boarding-house, where we boxed. I had not even a second. I never forgave him, and I should be sorry to meet him now; for I am sure we should quarrel. My most memorable combats were with Morgan, Rice, Rainsford, and Lord Jocelyn; but we were always friendly afterwards." "To a youth like Byron," says Mr Moore, "abounding with the most passionate feelings, and finding sympathy with only the ruder parts of his nature at home, the little world, a school, afforded a vent for his affections, which was sure to call them forth, in their most ardent form. His friends were, Robert Peel, George Sinclair, (son of Sir John,) whom he describes in classical acquirements the prodigy of our school days,' Clayton, another school monster of learning, talent, -and certainly a genius;" Poor Wingfield, (died at Coimbra, 1811,) to whom, of all human beings, I was perhaps, at one time, the most attached; William Harness, now a clergyman of distinguished talent and erudition, whose acquaintance he first formed on seeing him bullied by a larger boy, saying, Harness, if any one bullies you, tell me, and I'll thrash him, if I can;' Lord Clare, whom he loved with a brother's love, till his dying day, and others, gentlemen or noblemen all, and the cracks of the school. During those years, he became an admirable swimmer; and besides schoolboy fights, occasionally tackled to the clods,' one of whom, but for the interposition of his friend Tatersall, a lively high-spirited boy, had once, in a skirmish about a cricket ground, fractured Byron's skull with the butend of a musket. "Notwithstanding these general habits of play and idleness, which might seem to indicate a certain absence of reflection and feeling, there were moments when the youthful poet would retire thought moods of musing, uncongenial with the usual cheerfulness of his age. They shew a tomb in the churchyard at Harrow, commanding a view over Windsor, which was so well known to be his favourite resting-place, that the boys called it Byron's tomb;' and here, they say, he used to sit for hours, wrapt up in thought-brooding lonely over the first stirrings of passion and genius in his soul, and occasionally perhaps indulging in those bright forethoughts of fame, under the influence of which, when little more than fifteen years of age, he wrote these remarkable lines: My epitaph shall be my name alone. During the Harrow vacation of the year 1803, Byron resided with his mother, in lodgings at NottinghamNewstead being at that time let to Lord Grey de Ruthven. He was then in his sixteenth year-" a soul made of fire," and one of the "children of the sun." In his eighth year he had loved Mary Duff-in his fourteenth, Mary Parker-and now he delivered himself up to a passionboyish no more-but boiling in virile blood-in his heart's life-blood, which all his life-long would rush up to his face and back again to its agitated source-at the " magic of a name"-the name of Mary Anne Chaworth. "To the family of Miss Chaworth, who resided at Annesly, in the immediate neighbourhood of Newstead, he had been made known some time before, in London, and now renewed his acquaintance with them. The young heiress herself combined, with many worldly advantages that encircled her, much personal beauty, and a disposition the most amiable and attaching. Though already fully alive to her charms, it was at that period of which we are speaking, that the young poet, who was then in his sixteenth year, while the object of his adoration was about two years fascination whose effects were to be so lastolder, seems to have drunk deepest of that ing;-six short summer weeks which he now passed in her company being sufficient to lay the foundation of a feeling for all his life. He used, at first, though offered a bed at Annesly, to return every night to Newstead, to sleep; alleging as a reason, that he was afraid of the family pictures of the Chaworths,-that he fancied 'they had taken a grudge to him on account of the duel, and would come down from their frames at night to haunt him.' At length, one evening, he said gravely to Miss Chaworth and her cousin, 'in going home last night I saw a bogle;' which Scotch term being wholly unintelligible to the young ladies, he explained that he had seen a ghost, and would not therefore return to Newstead that evening. From this time he always slept at Annesly during the remainder of his visit, which was interrupted only by a short excursion to Matlock and Castleton, in which he had the happiness of accompanying Miss Chaworth and her party; and of which the following interesting notice appears in one of his memorandum books: When I was fifteen years of age, 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 have been long 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. We were a party,- -a Mr W., two Miss W.'s, Mr and Mrs Cl-ke, Miss R., and my M. A. C. Alas! why do I say my? Our union would have healed feuds in which blood had been shed by our fathers, it would have joined lands broad and rich, it would have joined at least one heart in two persons, not ill matched in years, (she is two years my elder,) and-and-and-what has been the result?"" This passion sunk so deep into his mind as to give a colour to all his future life. That unsuccessful loves are generally the most lasting, "is a truth, however sad, which unluckily," says Mr Moore, "did not require this instance to confirm it." Neither this nor a thousand other instancesbegging Mr Moore's pardon-can confirm the truth of any such senseless assertion. If unsuccessful, mean unrequited loves-which here they manifestly must do-then all observation and all experience shew that generally they are transient. It must be so. It is altogether unnatural to cling hopelessly-for ever and ever-to any passion-of love or hate. It must die. If it lived long intensely, it would kill the soul of the sufferer. If it live long languid ly, then we must not call it lasting; for languor is one thing, and passion is another-and what right to the name of passion has a vague, aimless feeling, that now and then, to the touch of some accidental association, lifts its head up from sleep, and then lays it down again on the pillow of oblivion? But suppose we are wrong in this, and that an unsuccessful passion may be lasting,-let Mr Moore shew the principle of its life. It will puzzle him to do so-and yet if any man may, he may, for he has a feeling and a faithful heart. But suppose he were to prove that unsuccessful passions are often lasting,-he must then proceed to prove farther, that they are generally more lasting than successful passions; a creed which no married man, especially one who, we are happy to know, is as happy as all the friends of genius and virtue could desire, may hold, or at least promulgate, without peril; and which, rather than try to swallow, we should prefer making the same attempt first on the Thirty-nine Articles. Our creed (but we are bachelors) is just the reverse of Mr Moore's-that almost all unsuccessful passions are evanescent (Byron's was not, but exceptio probat regulam)—and that all successful passions are lasting, except when one or both of the parties have been, to an undue and dangerous degree, knaves or fools-or bothin which cases successful passion lasts for a month at the most-a week -a day-or an hour-and then is gone for ever, like a flash of gunpowder.-Are there no happy marriages? Mr Moore says, that the picture which Byron has drawn of his youthful love, in one of the most interesting of his poems, "The Dream," shews how genius and feeling can elevate the realities of this life, and give to the commonest events and objects an undying lustre. The old hall at Annesly, under the name of the "antique oratory," will long call up to fancy the "maiden and the youth," who once stood in it; while the image of the " lover's steed," though suggested by the unromantic race-ground of Nottingham, will not the less conduce to the general effect of the scene, and share a portion of that light which only genius could shed over it! That is beautifully expressed, and the sentiment is true to nature. But In the month of October 1805, Byron, then in his eighteenth year, was removed to Trinity College, Cambridge. So much had he disliked leaving Harrow," that I broke my very rest for the last quarter with counting the days that remained. I always hated Harrow till the last year and half, but then I liked it. Secondly, I wished to go to Oxford, and not to Cambridge. Thirdly, I was so completely alone in this new world, that it half broke my spirits. My companions were not unsocial, but the contrary-lively, hospitable, of rank and fortune, and gay, far beyond my gaiety. I mingled with them, and dined, and supped, &c. with them; but I know not how, it was one of the deadliest and heaviest feelings of my life, to feel that I was no longer a boy!" But at Cambridge, as at Harrow, he soon formed the most passionate friendships-one with a mild musical character, of the name of Eddlestone, who afterwards entered into a mercantile house, and died early of consumption—and another more equal, and therefore more natural and rational, with Edward Noel Long, (afterwards of the Guards, and in 1809 drowned, in a transport, on his passage to Lisbon with his regiment.) we cannot think it peculiarly applicable to the " Dream." The old hall at Annesly is not a common object in itself, and still less so is "the antique oratory." "A maiden and a youth," are doubtless common objects-but have not such common objects many millions of times been the themes-are they not the only themes, of all most impassioned song? And why so eloquent on such an achieve ment as this-as if it were singular -and to be accomplished only by the muse of a Byron? Commonest events and objects indeed! Are not all human passions, and all human incidents, of this character? Is death uncommon? Must genius be eulogized, because it can shed an "undying lustre" over LOVE? As to the lover's "steed"- -no more poetical animal going than a horse? Had his Lordship been about to mount a mule, or take his departure on a donkey, it might have required all his genius to throw an undying lustre over " that object" and "that event." The reader might have thought of Peter Bell. With regard to the race-ground of Nottingham,-as a portion of the earth's surface, it is not unromantic, but quite the reverse; merely as a race-ground, it will be neither the better nor the worse of Byron's "Dream." Let Mr Moore, next time he philosophizes on the power of poetical genius to shed undying lus- riding, reading, and of conviviality. We tre on "the commonest objects and events," turn from Byron in all his glory-to Wordsworth in all hisand then he will be just to nature and to her chosen Bard. Mr Moore continues,-" He appears already, at this boyish age, to have been so far a proficient in gallantry, as to know the use that may be made of the trophies of former triumphs in achieving new ones; for he used to boast, with much pride, to Miss Chaworth, of a locket which some fair favourite had given him, and which probably may have been a present from that pretty cousin, of whom he speaks with such warmth in one of the notices already quoted." This is indeed a sad falling off from the fine sentiment of the preceding paragraph; it is pitiably poor; like some of the worst bits of Thomas Little-and, oh! how unlike the best breathings of Thomas Moore ! "We were rival swimmers,-fond of had been at Harrow together; but there, at least-his was a less boisterous spirit than mine. I was always cricketing, rebelling, fighting, rowing, (from row, not boat-rowing, a different practice,) and in all manner of mischiefs; while he was more sedate and polished. At Cambridge-both of Trinity-my spirit rather softened, or his roughened; for we became very great friends. The description of Sabrina's seat, reminds me of our rival feats in diving. Though Cam's is not a very translucent wave,' it was fourteen feet deep, where we used to dive for, and pick up-having thrown them in on purpose-plates, eggs, and even shillings. I remember, in particular, there was the stump of a tree (at least ten or twelve feet deep) in the bed of the river, in a spot where we bathed most commonly, round which I used to cling, and wonder how the devil I came there."" 6 For the fourth time, too, he fell luckily in love" a violent though pure passion"-but he has not added the name of his fair favourite (so Mr |