John, who, dissatisfied at the conduct of Richard the Third, was among the first that joined Richmond upon his landing at Milford. He displayed great bravery at the decisive battle of Bosworth. His bravery was not unrewarded, for Henry bestowed upon him the offices of constable of the castle of Nottingham, and steward and warden of Sherwood Forest. Having no family, the lands descended to his brother Nicholas. It had been through barons or knights of the name of John, that the family had hitherto been chiefly enriched and ennobled; and in the reign of Henry the Eighth, another Sir John was made steward of Manchester and Rochdale, and lieutenant of the Forest of Sherwood. This Sir John was a great favorite with Henry, supporting him warmly in all his measures, and entering fully into all bis views, both in his change of religion and his changes of queens. In return for this, when the lands of the church came to be divided, he was not forgotten. The church and abbey of Newstead, with the manor of Papelham, and the rectory, with the adjoining lands, were given to him." Newstead Abbey was a foundation for regular canons of the Augustine order; its situation was beautiful, and its riches considerable. Sir John, the son of this expeller of the canons, and regainer back from the church of a good deal more than his ancestors had ever bestowed upon it, was high in favor with Elizabeth; and his son, Sir Nicholas, having gained much military skill in the wars in the Netherlands, was, if not of ultimate service to Charles, at least one of the first, firmest and boldest supporters of the royal cause, upon the breaking out of the civil war. In consideration of his services at the battle of Edge-hill, he was made governor of Chester; and he defended that city against the Parliament army for a considerable time. Sir John, son of the younger brother of this Sir Nicholas, was also a zealous royalist. He had been knighted by James at his coronation; was appointed governor of the Tower, after the Commons had denounced Colonel Lunsford; and in this situation he showed a great deal of firmness. He afterwards became an equally zealous and more fortunate partisan than his uncle Sir Nicholas. After the battle of Newbury, in which he played a very conspicuous part, he was, on the 24th of October 1643, created Baron Byron, of Rochdale, and appointed field marshal of all the king's troops in Worcester, Salop, Cheshire, and North Wales. His uncle, hav ing been taken by the Parliament forces, he was appointed governor of Chester; and having defeated Sir Thomas Fairfax, and performed some other services of importance, he was so hated by the Parliament, that they passed a special act, exempting him from pardon, and confiscating his property. The king, however, in the meantime appomted him governor to the Duke of York (afterwards James the Second), with whom he effected his escape to Holland.

From Holland he passed into Flanders, with his royal pupil, and was in the army of Marshal Turenne. He died at Paris, in 1652, without issue, and was succeeded in his titles and estates by his brother Richard, This second lord died in 1679, and was succeeded by William, the third lord. William, the fourth lord, was thrice married, but his first lady died of the small pox, soon after their marriage; and the three sons and daughters which he had by his second lady all died before him. William, his eldest son, by a third marriage, was born in 1722, and succeeded him in 1736. He had been in the navy in his younger years, and was a man of considerable influence at court: so much so as to procure the office of master of the stag hounds, in 1763; but being a man of ungovernable passions, he was, in 1765, sent to the Tower, under a charge of having killed his relation, Mr. Chaworth, in a duel, which took place under very peculiar circumstances, at the Star and Garter Tavern, in Pall-Mall. The dispute which led to this fatal catastrophe was begun and ended in the same room, and at the same meeting; Lord Byron insisting that they should instantly settle it by the sword, and with such light as one glimmering candle afforded. Being the more expert swordsman of the two, his friend and neighbor received a mortal wound, although he lived long enough to settle his own affairs, and supply such information as led the coroner's jury to return a verdict of wilful murder against his lordship. The trial, which excited an immense degree of public interest at the time, came on at Westminster Hall, before the Peers. It lasted two days, and ended by an unanimous sentence of manslaughter, pronounced by upwards of two hundred and fifty members of the upper house. Upon being brought up for judgment, he pleaded his privilege as a peer, and was in consequence discharged. After this affair, Lord Byron was shunned by his relations, and retired to his seat, where, though he lived in a state of perfect exile from persons of his own rank, his violent temper found abundant exercise in continual war with his neighbors, and sufficient punishment in the hatred of his tenants. In this unhappy state he lingered out a long life, doing what in him lay to ruin the paternal mansion for that other branch of the family to which he was aware that it would pass at his death, all his own children having descended before him to the grave. He died at Newstead, in -1798. John, the next brother to Lord William, and born in the year after him, that is, in 1723, was a man of a very different disposition, although his career in life was almost one succession of misfortunes. The hardships which he met with, while accompanying Commodore Anson in his expedition to the South Seas, are well known, from his own highly popular and affecting narrative; and his grandson, the poet, is supposed to have had some of the

sufferings of the Honorable John, afterwards Commodore and Admiral Byron, in his mind, when he gave some of the most exquisite touches to his admirably painted picture of the storm and shipwreck, in Don Juan. So unfortunate was he, in regard to weather, that he was known throughout the fleet by the name of "foul weather Jack," and the sailors had great reluctance to go to sea under his command. Against the enemy he had equally bad success; not that he was deficient either in bravery or in skill, but the weather was always between him and the enemy. Still he was a man who deserved and enjoyed the esteem of all about him, and was reckoned one of the best naval officers of his time.

His only son, who was born in 1751, who received an excellent education, and whose father procured for him a commission in the guards, was so dissipated that he was known by the name of "mad Jack Byron." He was one of the handsomest men of the time; but his character was so notorious, that his father was obliged to desert him, and to be but seen in his company was considered a stain. There was no dissipation, and hardly a vice, except those coming immediately within the penal statutes of the country, in which he did not occasionally, or even habitually engage. In his twenty-seventh year he found means to seduce Amelia marchioness of Carmarthen, who had been but a few years married to a husband with whom she had lived in the most happy state until she formed this most unfortunate connexion. The noise which this faux pas occasioned was very great, as well on account of its own enormity, as of the perfect happiness which had previously subsisted between the husband and the wife, and of the great reluctance which the husband had to believe in her guilt. That, however, was ultimately proved in a manner but too convincing; and after one fruitless attempt at reclaiming the lady, she was divorced by her husband and abandoned to her fate. That fate was both hasty and hard. The friends brought about a marriage between her and her seducer, which after the most brutal conduct his part, and the greatest misery and the keenest remorse on hers, was dissolved in two years by her sinking to the grave of a broken heart. In about three years after, Captain Byron sought to patch up his broken fortunes by matrimony; and having made a conquest of Miss Gordon, an Aberdeenshire heiress, he spent her fortune in a few years, and left her and her only child, the subject of this memoir, in a destitute and defenceless state. He went to France to avoid his creditors, and died at Valenciennes in 1791, little more than three years after the birth of his son, to whom, in the meantime, was given his mother's name of Gordon.

on.

Having thus traced the genealogy of Lord Byron, and given some account of those who preceded him in the title down to the

time when it descended to himself, we now come to the more immediately interesting part of our memoir,-that which relates to the noble bard himself.

The

George Gordon was born on his mother's estate in Aberdeenshire, on the 22d day of January 1788; and as his mother and himself were soon afterwards deserted by his profligate and dissipated father, the whole care of his infant years devolved upon the mother; and considering the state in which she was left, it is but natural to suppose that she treated the boy with every indulgence within her power. Tenderness and indulgence in his early years were rendered the more necessary, that, besides having one of his feet deformed, he was of a very weakly constitution. For these reasons, he was not quite so early sent to school as is sometimes the case, but allowed to expand his lungs and strengthen his limbs upon the mountains of the North. This initiatory education was evidently the best adapted for giving strength to his bodily frame; and the sequel showed that it was far from the worst for giving tone and vigour to his mind. This period of his life passed unheeded; but we find traces of its influence in many parts of his works. grandeur of nature around him; the idea that he was upon mountains which had never been permanently trod by the foot of a conqueror; the conversation of a people whose amusements at that time consisted in a great measure of the recital of heroic exploits against invaders; feats of strength, and demonstrations of independence, mingled with all the wild goblin stories usual among such a people, and in such a place; and, above all, the being left at leisure and without dictation, to contemplate those scenes and listen to those recitals, afforded an initiatory education for Byron, far more poetical than that which he could have obtained had he been nursed at the Abbey of Newstead, and nurtured after the fashion of its lords, in the proudest times of that high-spirited, but latterly wild and wayward family. It cannot be denied that the secondary part which well-brought up children, as they are termned in common parlance, are made to play in their occupations and their amusements, and even in their acquisition of knowledge, tends more to weaken their natural powers and blunt their perception and curiosity, than those indulgent parents who tell them every thing themselves, or those indolent ones, who procure hirelings to tell them every thing, seem to be aware. In infancy, there is more danger in being educated too much, than in being educated too little; and young master or miss, who is a parrot at five, has many chances of being a parrot through life. No doubt, the booklearning of the world must be communicated by an instructor; but the feeling of the beauties of nature, and the advantages or defects of society cannot be communicated. Tutors may load the memory,

but they can neither awaken the fancy nor implant the power of reflection; and hence it has, somehow or other, happened, that the men whose conceptions have been the most sublime, and whose descriptions have been the most forcible, have ever been those who have taken their own way of going to work. It may be true, that this licence of his infant years, may have given to Byron some of those faults of which he has been accused, as well as many of those peculiarities which whipped and trammelled dulness, to say nothing worse, has considered as faults; but it is equally true, that to the same origin must be attributed those transcendent qualities which, now that neither hypocrite nor driveller has to fear his lash, must throw all the erewhile blamed peculiarities of his character into the shade. The sublime rock, the dark lake, the dim forest, and the dashing stream, which the infant bard was allowed to contemplate, without the foolery of man's accompaniment, have in each of them a lyre strung by the hand of Nature herself; and how well be found out their tones and thought of modulating their sweetness, was well proved by the event. The single poem of Loch-na-gaur, which, though of course not written in infancy, is yet a recollection of infant impressions, proves that if the author was not then coaxed and courted by some hireling tutor who was drudging for a benefice, he was much better employed.

When a few years bracing upon the mountains had removed the symptoms of weakness with which George Gordon was born, he was sent to school, and there, though still an infant, he showed that he would one day form a character for himself. A school-fellow says, that he was naturally kind-hearted and generous, though at the same time dignified and reserved. The class used to jeer him, as boys are often in the habit of doing, upon the natural deformity of his foot; but though it was obvious that he felt keenly upon these occasions, and had spirit sufficient to chastise, when he chose, the impertinence of boys much older and stronger than himself, his feeling toward them had more of contempt than of anger or peevishness. During play-hours he was often apart, and seemed to be following trains of speculation which had no connexion either with the class or the school exercises; although when he pleased, he entered into their sports with an ardour and a zest far surpassing any of his fellows. As a scholar, there was nothing remarkable about him, excepting that, though he sought no assistance from his teacher or his class-fellows, and seemed to derive as little from the ordinary modes and means of study, he was by no means deficient in his tasks, especially those parts of them that depended more upon perception and judgment than upon mere memory.

While George Gordon was occupied in this manner, William,