LIFE OF LORD BYRON.

GEORGE GORDON, Lord Byron, the only son of Captain Byron, and Catherine, sole child and heiress of George Gordon, Esq., of Gight, in Scotland, was born on the 22d January, 1788, in Holles street, London. His father, a man of dissolute and extravagant habits, died in 1791, at Valenciennes, leaving his widow, who was then residing at Aberdeen, to support herself and her son on a pittance of £135 per annum. In 1794, his cousin, the grandson of the fifth Lord Byron, died at Corsica, and he became the presumptive heir to the peerage. The fifth Lord Byron died in 1798, and he succeeded to the title; and in the autumn of that year, removed with his mother from Aberdeen to Newstead Abbey, in Nottinghamshire, which since the reign of Henry VIII. had been in the possession of the ancient family of Byron. Lord Byron had received the first rudiments of education at a grammar-school in Aber

deen. He was next sent, in 1799, to the school of Dr. Glennie at Dulwich, and in 1801 to Harrow, which he quitted in 1805. He is described by the head-master of the latter school, the Rev. Dr. Drury, as sensitive in disposition, intractable except by gentle means, shy, defectively educated, and ill prepared for a public school; but exhibiting the germs of considerable talent, though it does not appear to have been then foreseen in what mode his talents would display themselves. He excelled in declamation; and oratory rather than poetry was thought to be the prevailing bent of his genius. He seems to have been an active and spirited boy, at first unpopular, but finally a favorite; ardent in his school friendships, and jealous of the attachment of those whom he preferred. Among these the most learned were Lords Clare and Delawarr, the Duke of Dorset, Mr. Harness, and Mr. Wingfield. He was on friendly but less intimate terms with the most distinguished of his schoolfellows, the late Sir Robert Peel. In classical scholarship Lord Byron acknowledged himself very inferior to Peel; but he was thought superior to him and to most others in general information. This was indeed extensive to a very unusual degree; and he has left on record an almost incredible list of works, in many various departments of literature, which he had read before the age of fifteen.

In October, 1805, he was removed to Trinity College, Cambridge. He slighted the university,

neglected its studies, and rebelled against its authority. Meanwhile he had commenced his poetical career, but at first feebly and with faint promise of future excellence. He first attempted poetry as early as 1800, under the inspiration of a boyish attachment to his young cousin, a daughter of Admiral Parker. In November, 1806, he caused to be printed by Ridge, a bookseller at Norwich, for private circulation, a small volume of poems, among which one, written at the age of fifteen, is remarkable as containing a presage of his future fame. Some of the poems in this collection were of too licentious a character; and, on the advice of Mr. Becher, a gentleman to whom the first copy had been presented, it was with praiseworthy promptitude suppressed, and replaced by a purified edition. In 1807 appeared his first published work, The Hours of Idleness; a collection of poems little worthy of his talent, and chiefly remembered through the castigation which it received from the Edinburgh Review. To this critique, which galled but did not depress him, we owe the first spirited outbreak of his talent, the satire entitled English Bards ana Scotch Reviewers, which was published in 1809. The length of this poem was increased, and many changes made in it, during its progress through the press. Censures of individuals were turned into praises and praises into censures, with all the fickleness and precipitance of his age and character. It contained many harsh judgments,

of which he afterwards repented; and able and vigorous as the satire was, and creditable to his talents, the time soon arrived when he was laudably anxious to suppress it. A few days previous to the publication of this satire, on the 17th of March, 1809, he took his seat in the House of Lords. He seems on that occasion to have keenly felt the loneliness of his position. He was almost unknown to society at large; there was no peer to introduce him; and his mortification led him to receive with ungracious coldness the welcome of the lord-chancellor. His unfriended situation inspired him with disgust, and chilled his incipient longing for parliamentary distinction; and even a few days after taking his seat he retired to Newstead Abbey, and engaged with his friend Mr. (now Sir J. C.) Hobhouse to travel together on the Continent. About the end of June the friends sailed together from Falmouth to Lisbon; travelled through part of Portugal and the south of Spain to Gibraltar; sailed thence to Malta and afterwards to Albania, in which country they landed on the 29th of September. From this time till the middle of the spring of 1811, Lord Byron was engaged in visiting many parts of Greece, Turkey, and Asia Minor; staying long at Athens, Constantinople, and Smyrna. He touched again on his return at Malta, quitted it on the 2d of June, and early in July, after two years absence, landed in England. His affairs during this period had fallen into disorder, and it be

came advisable to sell either Rochdale or Newstead. The latter he was then most anxious to retain, and professed that it was his "only tie" to England, "if he parted with that he should remain abroad.” In a letter to a friend, written during his homeward voyage, he thus expresses his melancholy sense of his condition: "Embarrassed in my private affairs, indifferent to public, — solitary without a wish to be social, with a body a little enfeebled by a succession of fevers, but a spirit I trust yet unbroken, I am returning home, without a hope and almost with. out a desire." This gloom was still deepened by numerous afflictions. His mother died on the 1st of August, without his having seen her again since his return to England, and he was deprived by death of five other relatives and friends between that and the end of August. "In the short space of one month," he says, "I have lost her who gave me being, and most of those who made that being tolerable." Amongst the latter were Wingfield, and Matthews, the brother of the author of The Diary of an Invalid. At this period of distress, he was approaching unsuspectingly a remarkable epoch of his fame. He had composed while abroad two poems, very different in character, and which he regarded with strangely misplaced feelings; the one called Hints from Horace, a weak imitation of his former satire; the other, the first two cantos of Childe Harold. The former he intended to publish immediately; but the latter he thought of so disparagingly (owing probably