When I looked out of my bed-room window, there were men and boys standing in front of the inn, casting dreary looks at the ragged and low-sweeping curtains of clouds that shrouded every hill, and then longing looks at the windows, if the slightest possible breaks in those clouds occurred, hoping to be called and engaged as guides and game-carriers on the hills. Keepers were walking about, and bringing bags of shot in. Men and boys, already looking wet and dirty, as if they had tramped with their strong shoes some distance out of the country to come hither, asked them if they thought it would take up; and they cast knowing looks at the clouds and shook their heads. But anon! as if in very desperation, there were dogs let loose, which ran helter-skelter over the bridge toward the hills, full of eager life for the sport; and gigs full of gentlemen, three or four together, packed close, in white hats, or glazed and turned-up wide-awakes, and their shooting-jackets close buttoned up, with their guns erect at their sides, setting off for their shooting-grounds. They were determined to be at their stations, perhaps some ten miles off, and take the chance of a change in the weather. Good luck to them!

I took my way back again to Aberdeen; and lo! at Banchory the inn door still crowded with livery-servants, and poor Sir John Guest still seated at the selfsame window, with long and melancholy face watching the clouds! Truly the sporting, not less than the Christian life, has its crosses and its mortifications.

Lord Byron's first journey in England was with his mother, to see his ancestral abode—his abbey and estate of Newstead. It was a considerable step from the rooms over the shop at Aberdeen, or the little hut at Ballatrich, with £123 a year; but yet, for a lord, it was no very magnificent subject of contemplation. The estate had been dreadfully denuded of wood, and showed a sandy nakedness of meager land, the rental of a great part of which would be high at ten shillings an acre. The old abbey was dilapidated, and menacing in various places to tumble in. The gardens were a wilderness of neglect:

The place was, after a time, let to Lord Grey de Ruthyn, who let ruin take its course, as the old lord had done. When the old lord died, the host of crickets which he had fed are said to have taken immediate flight, issuing forth in such a train that the servants could scarcely move without treading on them. When Lord Grey's lease was out, he and his hounds took their flight in like manner; but this was some years afterward, and for the present Mrs. Byron betook herself to Nottingham, and placed her son under the care of Mr. Rogers, the principal schoolmaster there, and under that of a quack, one Lavender, to straighten his feet. Thence they removed to London, where they resided in Sloane Terrace, and Byron was sent to Dr. Glennie's school at Dulwich. Thence he was removed to Harrow, and during the years he spent there Mrs. Byron went to reside again at Nottingham, and afterward at Southwell, with occasional visits to Bath and Cheltenham. Harrow and Cambridge were, of course, for the chief part of the years of his minority, his proper homes, but the vacations were chiefly spent at Southwell, with frequent visits to Newstead and Annesley. Before his minority, however, expired, Lord Grey de Ruthyn had quitted Newstead, leaving it in a deplorable state of dilapidation, and Lord Byron incurred great expense in repairing the abbey, much, indeed, beyond the reach of his resources. His income was small; for the best part of his ancestral property had been sold by the late lord, especially the Rochdale estate, which was afterward recovered. The allowance for his education was all that he could claim from his trustees, and his mother's small income was eked out by a pension of £300 per annum. The debts incurred by him for the repairs of Newstead not being legally recoverable, as they were incurred by a minor, remained for years unpaid; and the importunities of his creditors were one of the strongest motives for his early traveling abroad. The failure of his hope of marrying Miss Chaworth, and adding her estate, which adjoined his own, to Newstead, was, both in affection and in point of fortune, a severe blow. His embarrassments finally compelled him to sell Newstead, and to make a marriage de convenance, which, to a person of his peculiar temperament, habits, and opinions, was certain to result in trouble and disunion. From these causes his life became unsettled and imbittered, and scarcely had he reached the period at which his fame ought to have made his native land the proudest and happiest of all lands to him, when he abandoned it forever, and

Of Newstead and Annesley I have given a particular account in The Rural Life of England. To these I must refer, and have only to add that, in the hands of Lord Byron's old schoolfellow, Colonel Wildman, Newstead is restored and maintained as all lovers of English genius would wish it to be, and is ever open to their survey. Since that account, too, the old hall of Annesley has undergone a renovation, and that scene of melancholy, desertion, and decay there described, exists now only in the volume which recorded it. In the present paper Southwell and Harrow will chiefly demand our attention.

Southwell, during the period of his Harrow school-life, became a most favorite resort of his. His mother had settled down there. Body and mind were now in progress of expansion toward manhood. His relish for society, his love of fame, and his love of poetry, were every day more and more developing themselves. But his world yet was only the school world. He was shy in general society. Here, however, he formed a group of friends of superior taste and education, in whose quiet little circle he became speedily at home, and for a time into this circle he seemed to throw himself, with all his heart and youthful enthusiasm. The Pigotts, the Beechers, the Leacrofts, &c., were his friends. Here he used to spend his summer vacations; here, it seems, he spent nearly the whole of one year. His dogs, his horses, firing at marks, swimming, and private theatricals, were his amusements, and for a time Southwell was his world. The Pigotts were his great friends, and there he went in and out, spent his evenings or spent his days, to his great contentment. A wider and a gayer world had not yet opened upon him, and for a season Southwell and his friends there were every thing to him. Of course, in this little circle he was the great hero; it is not often that a little Cathedral town can catch a live lord; nothing could be done without him; every flattering attention awaited him; and for a time he was not too conversant with the great world for the little one of Southwell to be spoiled to him. Hence he made occasional visits to Newstead and Annesley, with whose heiress he had fallen deeply in love. Here he began to cultivate more sedulously the composition of poetry, in which he was warmly encouraged by his most intimate friends, the Pigotts and Mr. Beecher, all persons of very refined taste, and here, eventually, he put his first volume to press, with Ridge, a printer at Newark. It was from Southwell that he made an excursion to Scarborough with his young friend Mr., since Dr. Pigott, and was much smitten with a fair Quakeress, to whom he addressed the verses published in his Hours of Idleness. But he had not been long at Cambridge, and seen something too of London, before the charm of Southwell had vanished, and we find him protesting that he hated Southwell. "Oh! Southwell, Southwell, how I rejoice to have left thee, and how I curse the heavy hours I dragged along, for so many months, among the Mohawks who inhabit your kraals!" During the time that he spent there, his hours certainly did not drag very heavily. It was only on looking back from a gay scene that they appeared so to him. No one who now visits that quiet village will be surprised that a scene so still, though so naturally pleasant, could not long hold a spirit of so restless a caste. For, by his own experience,

Most of his old friends have long left the place. Dr. Pigott, to practice at Nottingham; others are dead. Miss Pigott still lives in the house which her society and music made so agreeable to him. Mr. Beecher too still lives, and has not lived without setting the stamp of his mind on the age. To him we are, in fact, indebted for the New Poor Law. Long before the old act was rescinded, he resolved to test its powers, and he proved that if exerted they were equal to the utmost necessity of the country. He and his friend, the Rev. Mr. Lowe, of Bingham, enforced these powers in their respective parishes, where the poor's rates had grown to an equality with the rental, and the spirit of pauperism showed itself in its worst shape, that of the demoralized indolence and insolence of the young and able-bodied laborers. These gentlemen began by adopting the plan of refusing any relief to such except in the shape of labor. They insisted on all such as they pleased coming into the house, and there carried out the plan of separating husbands, wives, and children. The uproar that this produced was terrible. The people threatened to destroy the authors of this scheme, and demolish their property. Soldiers were obliged to be called in at Bingham, and finally the magistrates triumphed. The paupers were reduced to obedience, and the parish rates fell to a nominal sum. These facts and results were published by Mr. Beecher in a pamphlet, which, falling into Lord Brougham's hands, became the seed of the New Poor Law. The merits of that law do not claim discussion here; it was only necessary to point out this great fact of the life of that early friend of Lord Byron, whose influence was so great with him as to induce him to commit his first volume to the flames.

In the summer of 1845 I paid a visit to Southwell. The day, for a wonder, was fine, for a more rainy or cold June never passed. The little town looked very pleasant in its quietness. Every one knows how a Cathedral town does look; all asleep in the sunshine, if sunshine there be. A few shops, that seem to be expecting customers sometimes; a large inn, that must, too, have visitors sometimes, or it could not exist. A number of pleasant villas in their pleasant gardens, full of roses, and green plots not shaven quite so close as in greater and smarter places, amid a great deal of greenness every where in gardens, crofts, and meadows. The old minster standing aloft in venerable and profoundly silent majesty, in its ample green burial-ground.

The minster at Southwell is much finer than I had supposed. It has three square towers; two at the west end, and one, I think, near the east. It is Saxon; has fine, zigzag archway doors at the west, and also at the north and south porches. In the north porch, each side is lined with those crossed arches, which form pointed arches, and are supposed to have first discovered them to the builders. The outer walls have also zigzag bands. The windows have been inserted, many of them, since the minster was built. Some are early English; some of the Perpendicular Order; but there are also round-headed ones, and round-headed blank arches on the walls of the tower. All is in perfect taste, according to the time in which the work was done, and is kept in excellent preservation. The inside is particularly neat, and the reading-desk is a brass eagle, which, having been found at the bottom of the lake at Newstead, where it is supposed to have been thrown at the dissolution of the abbey by the monks, would be an object on which Lord Byron would look with great interest. It contained writings connected with the estate, which the angry monks might wish to destroy.

We looked into the ruins of the old palace adjoining the minster yard, where Cardinal Wolsey was entertained on his last journey to York, and found ourselves in a lovely garden, the walls of which were the gray and irregular ruins of this ancient fabric, and the house running along one side of it, evidently, though old, built partly up out of its material. Every one knows how charming such an old house looks. Its low range, its irregular windows, its front partly overhung with roses, jasmines, and figs; the open porch, and the peeps of goodly pictures, or rather the frames of the pictures, rich curtains, and furniture—the attributes of wealth; and the greensward of the court garden filling with its velvet the area between the old and rugged walls.

Under the obliging guidance of Dr. Calvert, I went round to see the people with whom Byron used to associate; unfortunately, Miss Pigott was in London. We had a glimpse of her entrance-hall, and that was all. The house is one of those old-fashioned, rather darkish houses, that one sees in such places, and in the hall were heaps of busts, apparently phrenological specimens, and so on.

We went then to the house where Byron's mother lived. It is at the opposite end of the town, or village. It is called Burgage Manor, and stands on the top of a sloping green, called Burgage Green, very pleasantly, and at the back looking over a pleasant stretch of country toward Farnsfield. The house is a good, large, and pleasant house, but has, it seems, been considerably enlarged since Mrs. Byron lived in it; in fact, another half built to it in front. Unluckily, the lady who now inhabits it was absent too, so that we could learn nothing particular about it. It was undergoing painting, and we entered it, and walked about the lower rooms, which are just good, pleasant, modern rooms. The hall has a number of middling portraits, apparently belonging to the lady's family. A Mary Childers; several ladies of the name of Mace, a Rev. Jackson, without a Mr., a John, or Thomas to his name; just thus—Rev. Jackson, a sandy-haired, schoolmaster-looking man, leaning on his elbow, and apparently trying to look very full of calculation. One picture was very funny. It was that of a little girl of about five or six years old, in an old-fashioned dress, and her hair dressed in a very wiggish fashion, and apparently powdered. She occupied the center of the picture, and stood facing you, and on each hand a white rabbit was partly rearing up and looking at her, and under the three figures stood their names—Mary Mace, Mary Burton, and Mary Beecher. No doubt there was some story connected with them. I suppose Mary Mace and Mary Beecher were play-fellows of the little girl, and that she had called her two white rabbits after them.

Near this house, but on the opposite side of the green, or, rather, of this corner of the green, is the house of Major Leacroft. This is the house where Byron used to join in private theatricals. The family which he was acquainted with is gone; the proprietor dead; and this Major Leacroft is another sort of man, a wealthy recluse, and collector of pictures.

In going from one place to another, we went round by the Greet, the stream in which Byron used to bathe, and where he dived for a lady's thimble, which he took from her work-box and threw in. The Greet is a mere brook, and for the most part so shallow that a man would much sooner crack his skull in it than dive very deep, unless it were above the mill, where the water is dammed up, or just below the mill-wheel by the bridge, but that is too public, being in the high road. Such is Southwell, in Nottinghamshire, which will always be livingly associated with one of the happiest periods of the life of Lord Byron.

Harrow being so near the metropolis, will naturally draw many visitors, as another of the happiest scenes of Byron's youthful life. Here he represents himself to have been eminently happy, and always looked back to this period of his youth with particular affection. The school-room where he studied, the tomb where he used to sit in the church-yard, and the spot where his natural daughter, Allegra, is buried, will always excite a lively interest. This tomb is still called by the boys at Harrow, "Byron's tomb," and its identity is very accurately fixed by himself in a letter to Mr. Murray, when giving direction for the interment of his daughter. "There is a spot in the churchyard, near the footpath, on the brow of the hill looking toward Windsor, and a tomb under a large tree, bearing the name of Peachie or Peachy, where I used to sit for hours and hours when a boy. This was my favorite spot; but as I wish to erect a tablet to her memory, the body had better be deposited in the church. Near the door, on the left hand as you enter, there is a monument, with a tablet containing these words:

I recollect them after seventeen years, not from any thing remarkable in them, but because from my seat in the gallery I had generally my eyes toward that monument. As near as convenient I could wish Allegra to be buried, and on the wall a marble tablet placed, with these words:

In Memory of
Allegra,
Daughter of G. G. Lord Byron,
Who died at Bagna Cavallo,
In Italy, April 20th, 1822,
aged five years and three months.
'I shall go to her, but she shall not return to me.'

2d Samuel, xii., 23."

These are interesting landmarks to the visitor, who will find the path to the tomb beneath the large elm well tracked, and the view there over the far-stretching country such as well might draw the musing eyes of the young poet. Captain Medwin says he saw the name of Byron "carved at Harrow in three places, in very large characters—a presentiment of his future fame, or a pledge of his ambition to acquire it." The play-ground and cricket-ground will also be visited with equal interest. There we see in these a new and eager generation of fine lads at play, and then we have a lively idea of what Byron and his cotemporaries were at that time, now less than forty years ago. No one was a more thorough schoolboy, in all the enjoyment of play and youthful pranks, than Lord Byron, as he himself, in verses addressed to one of his school comrades, shows us, and as all his schoolfellows testify of him.

But the whole of this poem, called Childish Recollections, published in the Hours of Idleness, is filled by the charms of recollected school delights at Harrow. Here his schoolfellows, among others, were Lord Clare, for whom, through life, he retained the warmest attachment, Lord Delaware, the Duke of Dorset, to whom he addressed one of his early poems, Colonel Wildman, who afterward purchased Newstead, Lord Jocelyn, the Rev. William Harness, &c. He says, "P. Hunter, Curson, Long, Tattersall, were my principal friends. Clare, Dorset, Colonel Gordon, De Bath, Claridge, and John Wingfield, were my juniors and favorites." Last, and not least, Sir Robert Peel was his cotemporary, and it is now with very odd feelings that we read the anecdote in Byron's life, that when a great fellow of a boy-tyrant, who claimed little Peel as a fag, was giving him a castigation, Byron came and proposed to share it. "While the stripes were succeeding each other, and poor Peel writhing under them, Byron saw and felt for the misery of his friend; and although he knew that he was not strong enough to fight ****** with any hope of success, and that it was dangerous even to approach him, he advanced to the scene of action, and with a blush of rage, tears in his eyes, and a voice trembling between terror and indignation, asked very humbly if ****** would be pleased to tell him 'how many stripes he meant to inflict.' 'Why,' returned the executioner, 'you little rascal, what is that to you?' 'Because, if you please,' said Byron, holding out his arm, 'I would take half.'"

With Harrow, we take leave of the years of innocent boyhood. His removal to Cambridge, and his now long residences in London, led him into those dissipations and sensualities which continued to cast a sad foil on the greater part of his after life. To Cambridge he never appeared much attached, and rather resided there occasionally as a necessity for taking his degree than from any pleasure he had in the place. His rooms in Trinity College, Cambridge, are nearly the sole locality which will there attract the attention of the admirers of the poet, except the Commoners' hall, in which now the long tossed about statue of him by Thorwaldsen is about to be erected.

It was during his being a student of Cambridge that Newstead Abbey fell into his hands by the expiration of Lord Grey de Ruthyn's lease, and that he went thither, and repaired it to a certain extent, and furnished it at an expense far beyond his resources at the time. Here, with half a dozen of his fellow-collegians, among whom was the very clever and early-lost Charles Skinner Matthews, he spent a rackety time. He had got a set of monks' dresses from a masquerade warehouse in London, and in these they used to sit up all night, drinking and full of uproarious merriment. "Our hour of rising," says Mr. Matthews himself, "was one. It was frequently past two before the breakfast party broke up. Then, for the amusements of the morning, there was reading, fencing, single-stick, or shuttle-cock, in the great room; practicing with pistols in the hall; walking, riding, cricket, sailing on the lake, playing with the bear, or teasing the wolf. Between seven and eight we dined; and our evening lasted from that time till one, two, or three in the morning. The evening's diversions may easily be conceived. I must not omit the custom of handing round, after dinner, on the removal of the cloth, a human skull filled with Burgundy. After reveling on choice viands and the finest wines of France, we adjourned to tea, where we amused ourselves with reading or improving conversation, each according to his fancy; and after sandwiches, &c., retired to rest."

It may well be imagined what a scandal this occasioned in the neighborhood. During this time there were still work-people employed in the repairs of the house; and I recollect a master-plasterer, who, at the same time, was doing work for my father a dozen miles off, relating, to our astonishment, the goings on of these gay roisterers. Byron himself says, that

And the person here referred to particularly mentioned one young damsel, dressed in boy's clothes, that Byron had there, no doubt the same who about the same time lived with him at Brompton, and used to ride about on horseback with him at Brighton. Here, at this time, his dog Boatswain died, and had the well-known tomb raised for him in the garden where the poet himself proposed to lie. Here he employed himself with writing his scarifying English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, which appeared about the time that he came of age, and so amply avenged him of the Edinburgh reviewers. Being, as he informs us, about ten thousand pounds in debt, he left his mother in possession of Newstead, and set out on his foreign tour. In two years he returned to England, not only triumphant, by the great popularity of his satire, over all his enemies, but having in his portfolio the first two cantos of his inimitable Childe Harold. From this moment he was the most celebrated man of his age, and that at the age of twenty-four. At one spring he ascended above Sir Walter Scott with all his well-earned honors. From the most solitary and friendless, because unconnected, man of his rank, living about town in clubs and lodgings, for his few college friends were scattered abroad in the world, he became at once the great lion of all circles. Lord Holland, Rogers, Moore, &c., were his friends. He was besieged on all sides by aristocratic blue-stockings and givers of great parties. His life was, for four or five years, that of the most perfect Circean intoxication of worship and dissipation; yet during this period he poured out the Giaour, the Bride of Abydos, the Corsair and Lara, poems of great vigor and beauty, and new in scene and spirit, but by no means reaching that height of poetical wealth and glory which he afterward mounted to. Then came his ill-starred marriage, and in one short year his utter and lasting separation from his wife. This unfortunate marriage, against which he was strenuously warned by his most experienced friends, became the blight of his whole life. To the last he persisted in protesting that he never knew the cause of his wife's withdrawal from him; but Lady Byron, in a paper addressed to his biographer since his decease, has assigned as the reason that she believed him insane, or, if not insane, not safe to live with. No wonder that his excitable temperament was lashed to a pitch of phrensy little short of madness, when such were his pecuniary embarrassments that, in the one year of his living with his wife, nine executions were levied on his goods, his rank only saving him from a prison. It is easy to perceive the effect of this on the proud and sensitive mind of Lord Byron; and when the hand that should have soothed him was coolly withdrawn from him on the occasion, the finish was put to mortal endurance. Banished, as it were, by the abhorrence of his country—of that country which, from worshiping him, turned as suddenly to denounce him—believing that in the abandonment by a wife there must be some hideous cause, he went forth never to return.

The limits of this work will necessarily confine any minute account of the homes and haunts of our poets to those only which lie within the British isles; I shall, therefore, only summarily trace the progress of Byron's wanderings and abodes from this period; and before doing this, I will point out in a few lines the residences which he occupied during the five years of his London life. Before he went abroad, Gordon's Hotel, Durant's Hotel, both in Albemarle-street, and 8 St. James's-street, were his homes. On his return from his first tour, he took on a lease for seven years a suite of rooms in the Albany, of Lord Althorpe. The year of his married life was chiefly spent at 13 Piccadilly Terrace. The clubs which he frequented were the Alfred, the Cocoa Tree, Watier's, and the Union.

In his first tour he traversed Portugal, Spain, Greece, and Turkey, tracking his way in light by the composition of Childe Harold. Now, abandoned by the one heart that he had chosen to be his domestic stay and solace through life, assailed bitterly by that public which had so recently devoured with avidity his splendid poems, regarded as an infidel and a desperado, he went from the field of Waterloo across Belgium, along the Rhine, through Switzerland into Italy, which became his second country, retaining him till a few months before his death. Every step of his progress was illustrated by triumphs of genius still more brilliant than before. From the moment that at Waterloo he exclaimed

till that in which he concludes with his sublime apostrophe to the Ocean, he advances from Alp to Alp in the regions of genius. Every one that traces the banks of the Rhine is made to feel what additional charms he has scattered along them; and how infinitely inferior are all, even the most enthusiastic and elaborate descriptions of its scenery from other pens.

Volumes of description could not give you so vivid a feeling of the characteristic features of the Valley of the Rhine as these lines. And thus through the Alps, "The palaces of Nature," Byron advanced into Italy, the land of ancient art, heroic deeds, and elysian nature. At Geneva he fell in with Shelley for the first time, and henceforth these two great poets became friends. At Diodati, on the Lake of Geneva, he spent the autumn, then advanced to Italy, and took up his abode in Venice, where, in the Palace Mocenigo, on the Canal Grande, he lived till December, 1819, i. e., about three years. His next remove was to Ravenna, where he had splendid apartments in the Guiccioli Palace. In the autumn of 1821 he quitted Ravenna, having resided there not two years, and took up his residence in the Lanfranchi Palace on the Arno, which he describes as large enough for a garrison. In the autumn of 1822 he quitted Pisa for Genoa, having resided at Pisa a year. At Genoa he inhabited the Villa Saluzzo at Albaro, one of the suburbs of that city, where he continued to live till the July of 1823, not quite a year, when he set sail for Greece, where in a few months his existence terminated.

Of Lord Byron's abodes and modes of life we have some graphic glimpses in Moore's life, in Shelley's and Captain Medwin's notices. Every where he remained true to his schoolboy habits of riding on horseback, swimming, firing with pistols; to his love of bull and Newfoundland dogs. Moore describes his house in Venice as a damp-looking mansion, on a dismal canal. "As we groped our way after him," he says, "through the dark hall, he cried out, 'Keep clear of the dog;' and before we had proceeded many paces further, 'Take care, or that monkey will fly at you:' a curious proof of his fidelity to all the tastes of his youth, out of the sort of menagerie which visitors at Newstead had to encounter in their progress through his hall." Soon after he adds, "The door burst open, and at once we entered an apartment not only spacious and elegant, but wearing an aspect of comfort and habitableness which, to a traveler's eye, is as welcome as rare." Captain Medwin somewhere mentions meeting Lord Byron, traveling from one of his places of abode to another, with a train of carriages, monkeys, and whiskered servants, a strange procession; and Shelley, visiting him at Ravenna, says, "Lord Byron has here splendid apartments in the palace of his mistress's husband, who is one of the richest men in Italy. There are two monkeys, five cats, eight dogs, and ten horses, all of whom, except the horses, walk about the house like the masters of it. Tita, the Venetian, is here, and operates as my valet—a fine fellow, with a prodigious black beard, who has stabbed two or three people, and is the most good-natured fellow I ever saw."

Of his house at Pisa, Byron himself says: "I have got here a famous old feudal palazzo, on the Arno, large enough for a garrison, with dungeons below and cells in the walls; and so full of ghosts, that the learned Fletcher, my valet, has begged leave to change his room, and then refused to occupy his new room because there were more ghosts there than in the other. It is quite true that there are most extraordinary noises, as in all old buildings, which have terrified the servants so as to incommode me extremely. There is one place where people were evidently walled up; for there is but one possible passage, broken through the wall, and then meant to be closed again upon the inmate. The house once belonged to the Lanfranchi family, the same mentioned by Ugolina in his dream, as his persecutor with Sismondi, and has had a fierce owner or two in its time."

The mode of spending his time appears by all accounts to have been pretty much the same every where. Rising about one o'clock at noon, taking a hasty breakfast, often standing. "At three or four," says the Guiccioli, "at Ravenna and Pisa, those who used to ride out with him agreed to call, and after a game at billiards they mounted and rode out." At the two latter places his resort was generally the forests adjoining the towns. At Ravenna, that forest rendered so famous by Dante and Boccaccio, especially for the story of the specter huntsman in the Decamerone; and at Pisa the old pine forest stretching down to the sea. Latterly he used to proceed to the outside of the city, to avoid the staring of the people, especially English people, then mounted his horse, and rode on at a great rate. In the forest they used to fire with pistols at a mark. The forest rides of Byron near Pisa and Ravenna will always be scenes visited with deep interest by Englishmen, and Shelley's description of themselves, the two great poets, in Julian and Maddalo, as they rode

is one of everlasting value. Returning to dinner at six or seven, he conversed with his friends till midnight, and then sat down to write.

Thus we have traced this great and singular man from the mountains of the Scottish Highlands, where he roamed as a boy, from land to land, till he stood as a liberator on the shores of Greece, and was seen for a few months riding forth with his long train of Suliote guards, and then was at once lost to Greece and the world. In no short life was there ever more to applaud and to condemn, to wonder at and to deplore. From those hereditary and other causes which we have already noticed, the temperament of Byron was passionate to the excess; but this extreme sensibility, which was the food and foundation of his splendid genius, was at the same time the torture of his existence. Misunderstood where he ought to have been soothed with the deepest tenderness, attacked by the public where he should have been most closely sympathized with, he went forth, as it were, reckless of peace or of character. A series of adulterous connections darkened his glorious reputation, and served to justify in the eyes of the public the accusations of those who had goaded him to these very excesses. But spite of the censures of the world, and reproaches of his own conscience, the powers of his genius continually grew till they even forced into the silence of astonishment the most heartless of his detractors. To say nothing of those grand and somber metaphysical dramas, Manfred, Cain, and the rest which he wrote in Italy, the poem alone of Childe Harold, ever ascending in magnificent strength, richness, and beauty, as it advanced, was sufficient to give him an immortality second to no other. The wide and superb field of its action—that of all the finest countries of Europe; the great events—those of the most stirring and momentous age of the whole world; and the illustrious names which it wove into its living mass; the glorious remains of art, and the still more glorious features of nature in Italy and Greece, all combined to render Childe Harold the great poem of his own, and the favorite of every after age. Totally different as he was under different impressions, Childe Harold had the transcendent advantage of being the product of that mood which was inspired only by the contemplation of every object calculated to draw him away from the seductions of society, and the lower tones of his mind; the mood inspired by the most august objects of heaven and of earth—the midnight skies, the Alpine mountains, the sublimities of mighty rivers and oceans, the basking beauties of southern nature, and the crumbling but unrivaled works of man. Filled with all these images of nobility and greatness, he gave them back to his page with a tone so philosophically profound, with a music so thrilling, with a dignity so graceful and yet so tender, that nothing in poetry can be conceived more fascinating and perfect. Every thought is so clearly and fully developed, every image is so substantial and so strongly defined, and the very skepticism which here and there betrays itself comes forth so accompanied by a pensive, earnest, and intense longing after life, that it resembles the melancholy tone which pervades the book of Job, and some of the prophets, more than that of any other human, much less modern composition. We may safely assert that there are a hundred combining causes, in the subjects and the spirit of Childe Harold, to render it to every future age the most lovely and endearing gift from this. Don Juan, the reflex of Byron's ordinary, as this was of his solitary and higher life—his life alone with Nature and with God—has its wonderful and inimitable passages; but Childe Harold is one woven mass of beauty and intellectual gold from end to end.

In judging the errors of Lord Byron, there is one consideration calculated to disarm severity perhaps more than all others. The excesses in which he had indulged were made by Providence the means of the severest punishment that could befall him. The cause of Greece aroused his spirit, at that period of life when life should have been in its prime, and a new scene of most glorious ambition was spread to him, that of adding to the unrivaled renown of the poet the still more grateful renown of becoming the savior of a country and a people, whom the triumphs of ancient art, science, liberty, and literature had made, as it were, kindred to the whole world. This august prospect was unveiled to him, and he rushed forward to secure it; but his constitution, sapped by vicious indulgence, gave way; the brilliant promise of new and loftiest glories was snatched from him; he sunk and perished. Reflecting on this, the hardest moralist could not desire a sadder retribution; and they who love rather to seek in the corrupt mass of humanity for the original germs of the divine nature, will turn with Mr. Moore to the fair side, and acquiesce most cordially in the concluding words of his biography. "It would not be in the power, indeed, of the most poetical friend to allege any thing more convincingly favorable of his character than is contained in the few simple facts, that, through life, with all his faults, he never lost a friend; that those about him in his youth, whether as companions, teachers, or servants, remained attached to him to the last; that the woman to whom he gave the love of his maturer years idolizes his name; and that, with a single unhappy exception, scarce an instance is to be found of any one once brought, however briefly, into relations of amity with him, that did not feel toward him a kind regard in life, and retain a fondness for his memory."

END OF VOL. I.