LORD BYRON. EORGE NOEL GORDON BYRON was born in London on the 22d of January, 1788. He was the only son of John Byron, a Captain in the Guards, and Catharine Gordon, a Scotch heiress, of Aberdeenshire. His mother and father lived unhappily together. The mother possessed an ungovernable temper, and the father was a profligate and a gambler who squandered his wife's fortune. The result was a separation, and the wife went to Aberdeen with her son, their only support being a slender income of £130 a year. In 1798, when ten years old, the son succeeded to the title of Lord Byron, and to the estate of Newstead Abbey, near Nottingham, and thither the mother and son removed, the youthful peer being sent to school, first to Dulwich, and afterward to Harrow. In 1805 he went to Cambridge University, and two years later he published his Hours of Idleness, a volume of youthful poems of no very remarkable merit. An adverse criticism of the work, which appeared in the Edinburgh Review, from the pen of Brougham, called forth the reply, English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, a vigorous satire which at once gained the ear of the public. Byron now (1809-11) made an extensive tour in Portugal, Spain, Greece, and Turkey ; and in 1812, soon after his return, the publication of two cantos of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage took the town by storm. In his own words, he awoke one morning and found himself famous. In 1815 Lord Byron married Isabella, daughter of Sir Ralph Milbanke. The union, however, proved an unfortunate one, lasting only a year. In January, 1816, about a month after the birth of her daughter, Augusta Ada (the Ada of Childe Harold), Lady Byron left her husband, ostensibly for the pur pose of paying a visit to her parents. On her way she wrote an affectionate letter to him, beginning" Dear Dick" and signed "Your Pippin.". To his roof, however, she never returned. Owing to her silence, the cause of the rupture has been shrouded in a mystery which has not yet been satisfactorily unraveled. To the storm of obloquy with which he was assailed he bowed, and in 1816 he left England never to return. As he himself justly said: "I felt that if what was whispered and muttered and murmured was true, I was unfit for England; if false, England was unfit for me; I withdrew." He went first to Switzerland, next to Italy, and finally to Greece. The period between his departure from England and his death was that in which he produced his greatest poetical work, including, among a multitude of poems and dramas, the third and fourth cantos of Childe Harold, Manfred, Cain, Don Juan, and The Vision of Judgment, the greatest satire of modern times. In 1823 he sailed for Greece to aid the patriots in their struggle for freedom; and here he died of fever on the 19th of April, 1824. His last intelligible words related to his wife, his sister, and his child. His body was taken to England, and being refused a resting place in Westminster Abbey, was buried in the village church at Hucknall, near Newstead. On the question of Byron's place in English literature, foreign criticism sides with Mr. Arnold rather than Mr. Swinburne. Goethe even ranks Byron before Wordsworth, as the greatest English poet since Milton; and Heinrich Heine, who hated England and things English with a perfect hatred, is fain to make an exception in favor of Byron, whom he terms "the greatest elemental force of the nineteenth century." Even Mr. Swinburne himself is constrained to admit that Byron's poetry possesses the supreme virtues of "sincerity and strength." Twenty years ago, and more, I remember being one of a merry party starting out on a visit to Newstead Abbey, the home of the illustrious Lord Byron. It was a lovely October morning when we left the ancient town of Nottingham; our way was over a part of Sherwood Forest, where Robin Hood and Little John had made the wild woods echo with their hunting songs. In some parts of the forest, the caves still were to be seen, where these wild roysterers of the olden time were wont to lie in wait for some "fat friar," or purse-proud abbot, that they might relieve them of their superfluous wealth. The day was one of those rich autumn days, in which it seems as if the glories of all seasons meet and blend, to show how fair and beautiful the world can be. "The leaves were paling yellow, And trembling into red." It was a merry party-youth and beauty side by sideand I, on my way back to college, after the long vacation, felt all a student's enthusiasm to visit the home and the last resting-place of the author of "Childe Harold." We arrived at Newstead a little before noon, and were permitted to wander all about the early home of this unhappy child of genius. Quaint and venerable, the abbey has no particular attractions of its own to awaken admiration. But if the prison of Chillon was a sacred place because Bonnivard trod its "floor into an altar," appealing thus "from tyranny to God," Newstead was sacred to me because associated with one whose genius the world must admire spite of all prejudices, and whose life remains one of the saddest stories of modern days. It was here the deformed boy first breathed the inspiration of the poet; along these garden-walks, his measured tread kept time with the music that breathed and burned within him. By that sundial, covered now with the soft, kindly mosses, young Gordon stood and looked out upon a turbulent, stormy life. On this rude garden seat, he sat and poured into the patient ear of Augusta, the only real friend he had in those years, all the story of his sad heart. Here, in the very garden that echoed the sighs of the despairing young poet, I could not but feel sad. For Byron was cursed in his early youth by the cruel coldness of those who ought to have been his best and truest friends. His sins were many in the after days. But the seeds, of which they |