in his usual moods as a lion-those shaggy eye-brows were not givendid not grow yonder-for nothing; and that he can roar—and often has roared, so as to shake all Ettrick, as if it had been the Lybian Forest. Wordsworth, on an Excursion, is generally as meek as becomes a lyrical ballad-monger, which he is to his eternal fame. But those still, profound eyes-with which he keeps looking for Truth in the bottom of the many silver wells among the mountains of Westmoreland-till he sees shining there the reflection of the mid-day stars-can lighten with less hallowed rays, and flash forthsometimes most needlessly-most human-most earth-born anger, uncongenial with the poetical or philosophical "moods of his own" or any other rational man's mind. We go no farther and we can go no higher; but who, although he

"Holds each strange tale devoutly true,"

the less loves, admires, and venerates those two spirits of good and great men not yet made perfect, for failings, frailties, vices, sins-call them what you will, and fear not-cling to the clay of which they are composed in common with all the rest of the children of mankind? Why then do you who make pilgrimages to Abbotsford and to Rydal-Mount-as to the shrines of Saints-shut your eyes to the bursts of their infernal and diabolical tempers-merely because they have never fallen on your own obscure and insignificant pericraniums; and yet on repairing to Newstead-Abbey, persist in moralizing over the unhappy temper and so forth of poor Byron, who, no more than they, ever injured you or yours, and whose temper, though often rolling and roaring like the Atlantic, was yet far, far oftener

and but for the blasts of heaven, would have been so almost always like the tideless Mediterranean sea, whose shores he has, even beyond the power of ancient genius, glorified by his immortal song? Speak-or be for ever dumb.

Byron's boyhood was on the whole beautiful. But, from the first dawn, it was beauty of a troubled kind. By an accident, which, it is said, occurred at the time of his birth, one of his feet was twisted out of its natu

ral position; and this defect, chiefly from the contrivances employed to remedy it, was a source of much pain and inconvenience to him during his infant years. The nurse, to whom fell the task of putting on these machines, or bandages, at bed-time, would often sing him to sleep, or tell him stories or legends, in which, like most other children, he took great delight. She also taught him, while yet an infant, to repeat a great number of the Psalms; and the first and twenty-third Psalms were among the earliest that he committed to memory-as they have been to many millions of other children. Out of those lessons arose, long afterwards, the "Hebrew Melodies." But for them, never would they have been written, though he had studied Lowth on the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews all his life. When not quite five years old, he was sent to a day-school, (terms for reading, five shillings the quarter,) kept by a Mr Bowers, whom, Byron tells us, the boys called "Bodsey Bowers," by reason of his dapperness.

"It was a school for both sexes.

I

learned little there except to repeat by rote the first lesson of monosyllables, (' God made man let us love him') by hearing it often repeated, without acquiring a letter. Whenever proof was made of my progress at home, I repeated these words with the most rapid fluency; but on turning over a new leaf, I continued to repeat them, so that the narrow boundary of my first year's accomplishments was detected, my ears boxed, (which they did not deserve, seeing it was by ear only that I had acquired my letters,) and my intellects consigned to a new preceptor. He was a very devout, clever little clergyman, named Ross, afterwards minister of one of the kirks, (East, I think.) Under him I made astonishing progress, and I recollect to this day his mild manners and I could read, my grand passion was hisgood-natured pains-taking. The moment tory, and why, I know not, but I was

Lake Regillas in the Roman history, put into my hands the first. Four years ago, when standing on the heights of Tusculum, and looking down upon the little round lake that was once Regillas, and which dots the immense expanse below, I remembered my young enthusiasm and my old instructor. Afterwards, I had a very serious, saturnine, but kind young man, named Paterson, for a tutor.

particularly taken with the battle near the

was the son of my shoemaker, but a good scholar, as is common with the Scotch. He was a rigid Presbyterian also. With him I began Latin in Ruddiman's Grammar, and continued till I went to the Grammar School, (Scotice, Schule; Aberdonice, Squeel,) where I threaded all the classes to the fourth, when I was recalled to England, (where I had been hatched,) by the demise of my uncle. I acquired this handwriting, which I can hardly read myself, under the fair copies of Mr Duncan of the same city; I don't think he would plume himself much upon my progress. However, I wrote much better then than I have ever done since. Haste and agitation of one kind or another have quite spoilt as pretty a scrawl as ever scratched over a frank."

On examining the quarterly lists at "the Grammar School" of Aberdeen, in which the names of the boys are set down according to the station each holds in his class, it appears, that in April of the year 1794, the name of Byron, then in the second class, stands twenty-third in a list of thirty-eight boys. In the April of 1798, however, he had risen to be fifth of the fourth class, consisting of twenty-seven boys, and had got ahead of several of his contemporaries, who had previously always stood before him. But Byron, at school, had " an alacrity at sinking." "He was, indeed, much more anxious to distinguish himself among his schoolfellows by prowess in all sports and exercises, than by advancement in learning. Though quick, when he could be persuaded to attend, or had any study that pleased him, he was in general very low in the class, nor seemed ambitious of being promoted any higher. It is the custom, it seems, in this seminary, to invert, now and then, the order of the class, so as to make the highest and lowest boys change places, with a view no doubt of piquing the ambition of both. On these occasions, and only these, Byron was sometimes at the head; and the master, to banter him, would say, 'Now, George, man, let me see how soon you'll be at the foot again.""

But we seek more anxiously for other dispositions in the boy Byron, than those towards his books-or even his plays; though it is pleasant to be told that the old Porter at the college "minded weel" the little boy, with the red jacket and nankeen trowsers, whom he has so often turned out of the college court-yard;

that he was "a good hand at marbles, and could spin one farther than most boys; excelling also at Bases,'-—a game which requires considerable swiftness of foot." But of his classfellows at the Grammar School, there are many, of course, still alive, by whom he is well remembered; and the general impression that they retain of him is,-that he was a lively, warm-hearted, and spirited boy, passionate and resentful, but affectionate and companionable with his schoolfellows, to a remarkable degree venturesome and fearless, and, as one of them significantly expressed it, " always more ready to give a blow than to take one."

Among many anecdotes illustrative of this spirit, it is related that once, in returning home from school, he fell in with a boy who had on some former occasion insulted him, but had then got off unpu nished; little Byron, however, at the time

promising to pay him off' whenever they should meet again. Accordingly, on this second encounter, though there were some other boys to take his opponent's part, he succeeded in inflicting upon him a hearty beating. On his return home, breathless, the servant enquired what he had been about, and was answered by him, with a mixture of rage and humour, that he had been paying a debt by beating a boy according to promise; for that he was a Byron, and would never belie his motto Trust Byron."

During this period his mother and he made occasionally visits among their friends, passing some time at Feteresso, the seat of his god-father, Colonel Duff-where the child's delight with a humorous old butler, named Earnest Fidler, is still remembered. In 1799, after an attack of scarlet fever, his mother took him, for change of air, into the Highlands -to a farmhouse in the neighbourhood of Ballater, forty miles up the Dee; and there, as Mr Moore says, "the dark summit of Lochiny-gair stood towering before the eyes of the future Bard; and the verses in which, not many years afterwards, he commemorated this sublime object, shew that, young as he was at the time, its frowning glories' were not unnoticed by him." Mr Moore beautifully, truly, and philosophically says,—

"To the wildness and grandeur of the scenes, among which his childhood was

passed, it is not unusual to trace the first awakening of his poetic talent. But it may be questioned whether this faculty was ever so produced. That the charm of scenery, which derives its chief power from fancy and association, should be much felt at an age when fancy is yet hardly awake, and associations but few,can with difficulty, even making every allowance for the prematurity of genius, be conceived. The light which the poet sees around the forms of nature, is not so much in the objects themselves, as in the eye that contemplates them; and Imagination must first be able to lend a glory to such scenes, before she can derive inspiration from them. As materials, indeed, for the poetic faculty,

when developed, to work upon, these impressions of the new and wonderful, retained from childhood, and retained with all the vividness of recollection which belongs to genius, may form, it is true, the purest and most precious part of that aliment with which the memory of the poet feeds his imagination. But still it is the newly-awakened power within him that is the source of the charm ;-it is the force of fancy alone that, acting upon his recollection, impregnates, as it were, all the past with poesy. In this respect, such impressions of natural scenery as Lord Byron received in his childhood, must be classed with the various other remembrances which that period leaves behind-of its innocence, its sports, its first hopes and affections-all of them reminiscences which the poet afterwards converts to his use, but which no more make the poet thanto apply an illustration of Byron's ownthe honey can be said to make the bee which treasures it."

Byron himself, in a note to his poem "The Island," tells us, that from this period " I date my love of mountainous countries. I can never forget the effect, a few years afterwards in England, of the only thing I had long seen, even in miniature, of a mountain, in the Malvern Hills. After I returned to Cheltenham, I used to walk there every afternoon at sunset, with a sensation I cannot describe." Mr Moore observes, that here Byron falls into the not uncommon anachronism in the history of one's own feelings, of referring to childhood itself that love of mountainprospects which was but the afterresult of his imaginative recollections of that period. Perhaps he did; for either in contemplating a present, or meditating on an absent beautiful scene in nature, we always do, in

unconscious confusion, blend, as Wordsworth says of his own delight in the grove-in his exquisite poem

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Nutting". our present feelings with our past"—and thus is constituted one full and entire emotion." But neither Mr Moore-poet as he is of a high, let us say of the highest order-nor any other man, can pretend either to tell or know with what feelings Lord Byron looked on Lochin-y-gair for the first time, and on the sea of mountains rolling away up from Ballater to the Linn of Dee. There must then have been awaken

ings-and risings-and swellings of the divine spirit within him, that owed not-could not owe-their birth to the power of association. Into his spirit, as into that of the boy (a a poet too-though he died when "nine years old," so it used to be, and so in our mind it will always be, in spite of all new editions) whom Wordsworth describes standing on the shore of Windermere alistening to the cataracts, what mysterious influences might then have flowed! It is one thing for a boy-a mere child-and that mere child Byron-to see the sun setting-or to be told that he is setting-from the window of a house in a street in Aberdeen -and another thing to see him setting from an observatory facing the western heaven, undistinguishably composed of blended clouds and mountains, all emerald-green, and opal-red, and amethyst-purple; and one such gaze on one such glory was enough to enable and entitle him-many long years afterwards-to look from pretty Cheltenham to the majestic Malverns, with an expansion of spirit which could never have dilated his bosom, had he not luckily had a scarlet fever, and a fond mother, as fierce as any fever, to waft him away, in childhood's dewy and golden prime, to the land of lights and shadows, of gloom and glimmer, of waving water-courses from those of rivers to rills, and of such risings and settings of suns, to say nothing of all their other day-dreams, as are not to be equalled, we verily believe, in any other region of the earth, "whatever clime the sun's broad circle warms."

"His love of solitary rambles, and his taste for exploring in all directions, led him not unfrequently so far as to excite

serious apprehensions for his safety. While at Aberdeen, he used often to steal from home unperceived; sometimes he would find his way to the sea-side; and once, after a long and anxious search, they found the adventurous little rover struggling in a sort of morass or marsh, from which he was unable to extricate himself.

"In the course of one of his summer excursions up Dee-side, he had an oppor tunity of seeing still more of the wild beauties of the Highlands than even the neighbourhood of their residence at Ballatrech afforded; having been taken by his mother through the romantic passes that lead to Invercauld, and as far up as the small waterfall, called the Linn of Dee. Here his love of adventure had nearly cost him his life. As he was scrambling along a declivity that overhung the fall, some heather caught his lame foot and he fell. Already he was rolling downward, when the attendant luckily caught hold of him, and was but just in time to save him from being killed."

About this period too-when not yet quite eight years old-he fell in love. According to his own account, that one feeling took entire possession of his thoughts; shewing, says Mr Moore, how early, in this passion, as in most others, the sensibilities of his nature were awakened. The name of the object of his attachment was Mary Duff-who was, like himself, a mere child-and the following passage from a journal kept by him in 1813, shews how freshly, after an interval of seventeen years, all the circumstances of his early love still lived in his memory. The child who could so feel for fair female infantile flesh and blood may -might-must-have felt many mysterious emotions from the

"Land of brown heath and shaggy wood, Land of the mountain and the flood."

"I have been thinking lately a good deal of Mary Duff. How very odd that I should have been so utterly, devotedly fond of that girl, at an age when I could neither feel passion, nor know the meaning of the word. And the effect! My mother 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 Coe.' 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. Now, what could this be? I had never seen her since her mother's faux-pas at Aberdeen had been the cause of her removal to her grandmother at Banff; we were both the merest children. I had and have been attached fifty times since that period; yet I recollected all we said to each other, all our caresses, her features, my restlessness, sleeplessness, my tormenting my mother's maid to write for me to her, which she at last did, to quiet me. Poor Nancy thought I was wild, and, as I could not write myself, became my secretary. I remember, too, our walks, and the happiness of sitting by Mary, in the children's apartment, at their house not far from the Plainstones at Aberdeen, while her lesser sister, Helen, played with the doll, and we sate gravely making love in our way.

"How the deuce did all this occur so ear

ly? Where could it originate? I certainly had no sexual ideas for years afterwards; and yet my misery, my love for that girl was 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 thunderstroke-it nearly choked me to the horror of my mother, and the astonishment and almost incredulity of every body. And it is a phenomenon in my existence, (for I was not eight years old,) which has puzzled and will puzzle me to the latest hour of it; and lately, I know not why, the recollection (not the attachment) has recurred as forcibly as ever. I wonder if she can have the least remembrance of it or me? I remember her pitying sister Helen for not having an admirer too. How very pretty is the perfect image of her in my memory-her brown, dark hair, and hazel eyes; her very dress! I should be quite grieved to see her now; the reality, however beautiful, would destroy, or at least confuse, the features of the lovely Peri, which then existed in her, and still lives in my imagination, at the distance of more than sixteen years. I am now twenty-five and odd months."

Thus strangely strung were all the passions of "the wild and wondrous child." Now-before-and ever after-his lame foot often troubled his spirit. What signified it? Little or nothing. 'Twas no great deformity -and if it had been, most men would have outgrown the remembrance of so small an evil. But he never did➡

and he to whom God had given wings to glide and soar over all the creation of mind and matter, suffered a clubfoot-yet hardly a club-foot-to embitter, to colour his whole existence! Yet was his face "most beautiful to see-a flower of glorious feature!" And his figure, too, shewed "a child of strength and state." But that one imperfection made him often forget that he was in face, form, and spirit an Apollo. Whenever he beheld a Venus, he thought of Vulcan. Had he been ugly, his lame foot would not have distressed him; but formed in all other things " in the prodigality of Heaven," and over women to be irresistible, here he was liable to the ludicrous-vulnerable not only in the heel, but in the sole, the toes, and the instep-on that one deformity the eyes of high-born beauty in her most melting mood might fall, and seem to his distempered imagination to loath as it lingered-while the vulgar prostitute, as she spied the defect, burst out-so it once happened into fits of drunken laughter-and when raised by his pitying hand that proffered the boon of charity, from the cold stone steps where the wretch had flung herself down to houseless sleep, ran off howling her hideous scorn in a storm of curses. Mr Moore does not shrink from some affecting recitals respecting this "defect in nature."

"The malformation of his foot was, even at this childish age, a subject on which he shewed peculiar sensitiveness. I have been told by a gentleman of Glasgow, that the person who nursed his wife, and who still lives in his family, used often to join the nurse of Byron when they were out with their respective charges, and one day said to her, as they walked together, 'What a pretty boy Byron is what a pity he has such a leg! On hearing this allusion to his infirmity, the child's eyes flashed with anger, and striking at her with a little whip which he held in his hand, he exclaimed, impatiently, Dinna speak of it! Sometimes, however, as in after life, he could talk indifferently, and even jestingly, of his lameness; and there being another little boy in the neighbourhood, who had a similar defect in one of his feet, Byron would say, laughingly, Come and see the twa laddies with the twa club feet going up the Broad Street.'"

One of the most striking passages

in the few pages of his own Memoir which related to his early days, is when, in speaking of his own sensitiveness on the subject of his de formed foot, he described the feeling of horror and humiliation that came over him when his mother, in one of her fits of passion, (as alluded to above,) called him "a lame brat.” Asall," ," says Mr Moore," that he had felt strongly through life was, in some shape or other, reproduced in his poetry, it was not likely that an expression such as this should fail of being recorded. Accordingly, we find, in the opening of his drama, The Deformed Transformed,'

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'Bertha. Out, Hunchback!
'Arnold. I was born so, mother.'

It may be questioned, indeed, whether this whole drama was not indebted for its origin to this secret recollection."

Farther on in the volume, we meet with another anecdote, illustrative of the mental agonies he was often doomed to suffer from the same cause. When in love with Miss Chaworth

then a mere schoolboy-if at any moment he had flattered himself with the hope of being loved by her, acircumstance mentioned in his " Memoranda," as one of the most painful humiliations to which the defect in his foot exposed him, must have let the truth in with desperate certainty upon his heart. He either was told of it, or heard Miss Chaworth saying to her maid, "Do you think I could care any thing for that lame boy?" This speech, as he himself described it, was like a shot through his heart! Though late at night when he heard it, he instantly darted out of the house, and, scarcely knowing whither he ran, never stopped till he found himself at Newstead. Years after that trial, and after he had been at Cambridge, we meet with another instance how, by that slight blemish, (as in his hours of melancholy he persuaded himself,) all the blessings that nature had showered upon him were counterbalanced. His reverend friend, Mr Becher, finding him one day unusually dejected, endeavoured to cheer and rouse him by representing, in their brightest colours, all the various advantages with which Providence had endowed him, and, among the greatest," that of a