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his privilege as a peer, and was in consequence discharged. 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 honourable 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, born in 1751, 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, who had procured for him a commission in the guards, was soon obliged to desert him; to be but seen in his company was considered a stain. In his twentyseventh 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 hed 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 we fruitless attempt at reclaiming the lady, she was divorced by her busband 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 on 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 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 mother's name of Gordon.

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GEORGE GORDON was born on his mother's estate in Aberdeenshire, on the 22d day of January 1788. As his mother and himself were soon terwards deserted by his 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 Tears were rendered the more necessary, as, besides having one of his feet deformed, he was of a very weakly constitution. For these reasons be 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 period of his life passed unheeded; but we find trace

of its influence in many parts of his works. The 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 recita of heroic exploits against invaders, feats of strength, and demonstration 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 a leisure and without dictation, to contemplate those scenes and listen to those recitals, afforded an initiatory education for Byron, far more poetica 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 may be true, that the licence of his infant years may have given to Byron some of those faults of which he has been accused, as well as many o those peculiarities which 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 must throw all the blamed peculiarities of his character into the shade. The sublime rock, the dar 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 he found out their tones, and thought of modulating their sweetness. was well proved by the event.

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 kindhearted 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 not in the least deficient in his tasks, especially those parts of them that depended more upon perception and judgment than upor

mere memory.

While George Gordon was occupied in this, William, the fifth Lord Byron, departed, at Newstead Abbey, that life which had for so many years been rendered disagreeable by his want of temper. As the son of Lord William had died in the same year in which George Gordon was born, and as the descent both of the titles and the estates was to heirs male, George Gordon succeeded to the titles and estates of his granduncle. The old Lord died on the 17th of May 1798; and thus the state and prospects of the heir were completely changed, when he was little more than ten years old. Upon this change in his fortune, Byron was removed from the immediate care of his mother, and placed as a ward under the guardianship of the Earl of Carlisle, who had married Isabella,

the sister of the late Lord Byron. It was immediately resolved upon, that he should receive the usual education which England bestows upon her titled sons: he was first sent to one of the great public schools, and from that to one of the universities. Harrow was the school which was chosen. He remained there during six years and then proceeded to Trinity-College, Cambridge. By this time his observation of the errors and absurdities of many of the usual systems pursued by men, and the inefficiency of the common means adopted for their removal, induced him to turn satirist; the bolt of his first effort fell upon the deans and doctors of Cambridge with a severity and a truth, which there is too much reason to believe has obtained for him their implacable enmity, and still continues to make them groan in anguish and growl for revenge.

When about nineteen years of age, Lord Byron bade adieu to the university and took up his residence at the family-seat, where he arranged, and had printed at Newark, a small collection of his poems, under the title of "Hours of Idleness." The apology urged for the appearance of this little volume, was the usual one of the "advice of friends; and though it has never been stated who those friends were, it is probable that his noble, and, as himself says, volunteer, guardian was one of them, as the publication is dedicated to him; a circumstance which the noble bard seems afterwards

to have regretted. This volume is not very remarkable for its power; but still, although he had published nothing more, it would have ranked in the catalogue, and high in the catalogue, of those lost literati, would have been men of genius had it not been for the weight of coronet. Unpretending, however, as was this little volume, and obscure was the press from which it issued, it appears to have been in a great measure the means of letting its author know the vast extent of his powers, and prompting him to the profitable and vigorous use of them, at early a period of his life. This was effected too, in a way which would have for ever silenced one of a less daring and undaunted mind. The Edinburgh-Review, then in all the life and greenness of youth, had, by e of the most bold and daring evolutions which ever was played off the literary world, taken the top-seat upon the bench of criticism by rm, and was condemning by wholesale; while authors of all classes and all descriptions, except the chosen few who composed or were known to its coterie, carried their wares to market with fear and trembling. This Review, which had generally been more anxious to find a victim which it could immolate, than an idol whom it could worship, pounced upon the "Hours of Idleness" with a fury almost unknown, or at any rate seldom evinced even by itself. Genius, learning, spirit, every thing good, was denied him, and the fact of his having ventured to set forth a book, in however humble and unpretending a manner, was held up as the ery acme of impudence and effrontery. The critic had his day; and the vorshippers at the counter of Archibald Constable and Company were duckling and saying to each other, "Well, we have done for this same George Gordon, Lord Byron, a minor. He won't tell us any thing more out his "Hours of Idleness." We have given him work for twelve baths at the least, in repenting of what he has already done." Such ere the exultations, as stated by one who heard them at the time; but they were not without an admixture of fear. They had succeeded in conFacing at least themselves that Lord Byron had no talent and no taste poetry; but if they had heard of him at all, they must have heard at he was a youth of great spirit; and hence, though they might reckon hemselves quite safe from the racing of Pegasus, there might still be

some danger of that which drives forward his wingless namesake upon earth: they were not over fond of the whip; and though one of their number had recently come scratch-free out of a duel in consequence of a stipulated charging with paper-bullets, it was by no means clear that Byron, gratuitously and wantonly as he had been attacked, would be so tender of the critical flesh. But the bard took his own way of avenging himself, and in his vindication inflicted more heavy and humiliating chastisement upon the critics than if he had horsewhipped them all, or shot half their number. That pen, with which he had been dallying in his "Hours of Idleness," he sharpened for business to its keenest point; and in brief space appeared "English Bards and Scotch Reviewers," in which, by the power and polish of his verses, he not only established his own claim to all those excellences of which the critics had noted him destitute; but covered them with ridicule and confusion which they have never been able to shake off. Nor was this all; for amid the chastisement of his unprovoked personal enemies, there was formed a general attack upon the faults, and a general scorn of the meannesses of human nature, which would have done credit to a writer of matured experience and confirmed reputation. It is true, that in this satire he attacked some. whom he afterwards found did not deserve it; but it is equally true that he attacked more upon whom it was well bestowed, both at the time and since; and there is not, in the whole annals of satirical writing, any instance of a satire written by so young a man, which is so perfect in its form and so correct in its application. Lord Byron, so far from making any boast of this great and happy effort, afterwards suppressed it. Up to the time of majority he continued to prosecute his fancies alternately at Newstead and in the metropolis. At the former place he spent much of his time alone, or at least in the society, or rather under the care of a great Newfoundland dog, to which he paid great attention while alive, and raised a monument when dead. During the whole of this period of his life, a period which, under his circumstances, was exposed to peculia dangers and temptations,-there is nothing which appears to bring him out from the usual character of young noblemen, unless it be higher mental endowments, and a more dignified use of them; and much as he has beer blamed by wholesale and in the abstract, none of his calumniators have been able to adduce the requisite tale of well authenticated particulars When the term of his minority had expired, he resolved to improve his knowledge of the earth and of mankind, by travelling abroad; and a the state of the middle and western parts of Europe was such that he could not conscientiously examine them, and as the information which these countries were calculated to afford, was not exactly that which suited the high and poetic turn of his mind, his thoughts were directed to the classic land of the east. Selecting as his companion, John Hobhouse, whose love of liberty and literature seemed congenial with his own, although their powers were of a very different order, he sailed from Falmouth for Lisbon, and having landed there, he first examined all that was worthy of remark in that neighbourhood, and then proceeded, by the southern provinces of Spain, for the Mediterranean, where he landed first on the wild mountains of Albania, whose bold scenery and bolder inhabitants appear to have made a deep and permanent impression upon his mind. Having traversed the classic land of Greece, in almost every direction, and studied its scenery, with the eye of a poet and a painter, and its people with the head of a sage and the heart of a patriot, he returned to England, better furnished in all the substantial fruits of travel

ling than perhaps any other man who ever returned to the shores of the same or of any other country.

Soon after his return from the Continent, the first and second cantos of Childe Harold made their appearance; and never did poetic work excite greater astonishment, or receive more universal attention or more general praise. The Edinburgh Reviewers, finding that their own consciences were in unison with the common feeling, forgot the mud in which they had been rolled, and hastened to pay their tribute to the giant intellect which this poem evinced, considering that it was the work of one whom the doctors had set down as being idle and dissipated, and who, when composing it had not completed his twenty-third year. From the time of Harold's making its appearance, Lord Byron was, by universal consent, and without so much as an effort or even a wish upon his own part, considered as the first poet of the age, not only in his own country, but in the world. Fastidious persons, indeed, showed some alarm at the boldBess of some of his doctrines, and many who believed in secret, cried shame at the publication of that which, though they felt it to be true in itself, they did not like to see proclaimed to the world.

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The keen and scrutinizing glance which Lord Byron had, during his avels, cast upon the scenery and manners of the East, and the deep pression which these had made upon him, were not confined to those waches of exquisite painting, of indignant anger, of unutterable despair, of shadowy and almost viewless hope, which burst forth in the novel terrible strains of Childe Harold; for they soon took a more complete ty and a form more perfectly oriental in the tales and fragments of es which now followed each other, varied in their style, but rapid in their succession, and having a sort of family likeness in the daring of ter sentiments and the dreadful fire of their colouring. Of those four -the Giaour, the Bride of Abydos, the Corsair, and Lara-the most arkable quality is the vast creative power which they display: not of them, if done into prose, would make a couple of readable pages, yet there is not one of them but contains genuine poetry, and images ach lodge upon the memory in spite of it, and will not quit for any wing. The daring positions, as rapid and as vast as the darting of Zalaing from cloud to cloud, or the starting of a meteor from sky to sky, with hurry one from the sweetness of affection to the harshness of Cay, and from the height of tenderness to the depth of crime; the barbarous and cold-blooded deeds of the oppressor; the dark and secret wirags of revenge in the oppressed, with the fearful form which that t when desperation and opportunity give it utterance; and, above all, the exquisitely affecting sketches of the clay-cold form of that Greece which was animated by the soul and warmed by the life-blood of freedom, while man and while liberty were yet fresh and young, have a vome and a power of poetry in them nowhere else to be found in ten the same compass. In each of those four poems the noble bard se a different structure and modulation of verse, each differing from in Childe Harold; but he proved himself equally a master and at me in them all.

On the second day of January 1815, Lord Byron was married to the ly daughter of Sir Ralph Milbank Noel, Bart., in the county of Dur; but this marriage, though it will bring a very considerable addition fortune to the orphan daughter of the bard, brought no substantial or permanent happiness to the bard himself. To be united to such a man Lord Byron was no doubt a proud distinction for any lady; but it was

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