EARLY LIFE OF LORD BYRON.

IT is difficult for an American citizen to realize what it is in England to be a lord. Common people can hardly stand upright or command their organs of speech in the presence of a man who has the legal right to place that little word, lord, before his name. One reason is, I suppose, that there are only four or five hundred lords in the whole British empire, so that many people never have a chance to see that a lord is, after all, only a man. Another reason is, that lords are almost always exceedingly rich, live in enormous castles or splendid mansions, and ride about in grand carriages. Then, too, most of them have names and titles which are met with in history, and in Shakespeare, and ignorant people suppose that when they see the Duke of Buckingham, they are looking upon a descendant of "my lord of Buckingham," whose head was cut off by Richard III. at Salisbury. In addition to all this, a lord sits in the House of Lords, and holds a rank in the commonwealth similar to that of senator in the United States.

Of course, the adulation which lords receive, even from their childhood, has an effect upon themselves, since they are but men, no better and no worse than others. It is apt to make them think that they are composed of a superior clay to that out of which common people are formed. All the foolish part of them fully believe that they differ from ordinary mortals as fine porcelain differs from the red material of flower-pots.

Byron, with all his genius, was infatuated with this ridiculous notion, and the more because the title came to him suddenly, when he was just old enough to be spoiled by it. He was a school-boy, ten years old at the time, living in Scotland with his mother, who had an income of one hundred and thirty-five

pounds a year, equal to about twenty-five dollars a week in our present currency. All at once came news that Lord Byron, the grand-uncle of the boy, was dead, leaving no heirs to his title and estates except this poor widow's son. Imagine the effect upon a forward, sensitive, bashful, imaginative boy, painfully ashamed because he had a lame foot. It seems that he was puzzled at first with his new lordship. The day after the news arrived, he ran up to his mother, and said:

Mother, do you see any difference in me since I became a lord? I see none."

The next morning, when the roll was called at school, the teacher, instead of calling out his name, George Byron, as he had always done before, gave it with the title prefixed in Latin.

The boy could not utter the usual response, "Adsum” (1 am present), so paralyzed was he by his emotions. Pale and speechless he stood, with the eyes of the whole school upon him, until he found relief in a gush of tears. The time never came when he could take a rational view of this imaginary honor. His friend and biographer, Thomas Moore, tells us that, in the height of his celebrity, he was more proud of his descent from the Byrons who came over from Normandy with William the Conqueror, than of being the most admired poet of his time.

Yet his ancestors were not people to be very proud of. To the immense estates granted them by William and his successors, Henry VIII. added others from the spoils of the church; which made the family one of the richest in England. Extravagance and dissipation so reduced its wealth, that the estate which little Byron inherited was small and encumbered with debt, — small, I mean, for a lord. A great number of Byrons, however, fought bravely in the ancient wars; there were as many as seven brothers of the name in the battle of Edgehill, during the civil wars, and it was for services rendered in that long contest, that Charles I. ennobled the head of the house, conferring the title which the poet inherited.

Captain Byron, the poet's father, possessed the worst qualities of his race. He was most recklessly dissolute and extravagant.

Having squandered his own fortune and that of his first wife, and incurred immense debts, he cast his eyes upon Miss Catherine Gordon, a silly, romantic, Scotch girl of ancient family and large fortune, and openly avowed his intention to marry her for the sole purpose of paying off his debts. In money, stocks, and land, the young lady possessed property equal to about a quarter of a million of our dollars; all of which, with her hand and heart, she bestowed upon this handsome, fascinating, and despicable debauchee. Before the honeymoon was over, a crowd of creditors came upon the husband of this fine estate. First, all the ready money was paid away,-three thousand pounds. Next went the bank stock and fishery shares, a thousand pounds more. Then, fifteen hundred pounds' worth of timber was cut from the estate and sold. Next, eight thousand pounds were raised by a mortgage on the estate, and all paid to creditors. Finally, when they had been married less than two years, the estate was sold, and all the money which it yielded was poured into the bottomless pit of Captain Byron's debts, except a small sum necessary to secure Mrs. Byron the annual pittance named above. When he had wrung from her all that she possessed, and even made away with part of her little annuity, he abandoned her and went off to the continent, leaving to her care their only son, a boy

three years of age. Such was the meanness of this contemptible animal, and such the infatuation of his foolish wife, that he actually squeezed out of her slender means the money that paid his expenses to the continent; and when he died, soon after, she had to pay more than a hundred pounds of small debts incurred by him just before his departure. She loved him to the last. When the news came of his death, she threw herself into such a passion of grief that her shrieks could be heard by the passers-by in the street below.

With all these facts before him, the poet could still be proud that he was a Byron. It was because he was himself a Byron. Soon after his accession to the title and estate of his grand uncle, his mother sold the furniture of her two or three rooms in Aberdeen for seventy-four pounds, and removed with her boy to Newstead Abbey, a fine old mansion in Nottinghamshire,

which Henry VIII. had given to the family when he broke up the abbeys and monasteries, two hundred and sixty years before.

From this time he lived the usual life of a young lord. He was a wilful, active, inquisitive, affectionate boy, a great reader, an irregular student, and exceedingly ambitious to excel in the sports of the play-ground. Three times before he was fifteen he thought himself in love. When first he imagined himself the victim of the tender passion he was only eight years of age, and he cherished so fond a recollection of his infant flame, that when, at the age of sixteen, his mother carelessly told him that his 'old sweetheart, Mary Duff," was married, he was nearly thrown into convulsions, which so alarmed his mother that she avoided. mentioning the subject to him ever after. Attwelve he thought himself madly in love with a beautiful cousin. "I could not sleep I could not eat-I could not rest," he afterwards wrote. The last of his boyish passions, which siezed him when he was fifteen, before it was possible for him to have been really in love, was not so violent as his first; but he always spoke of it as something exceedingly serious. The lady was much older than himself, and very properly regarded and treated him as a schoolboy..

The worst enemy he ever had was his mother. She was an ignorant, foolish woman, disagreeable in her appearance, very fat and awkward, capricious, and of a violent temper. She indulged him most injuriously, often permitting him to absent himself from school for a week at a time, and when she was angry with him, her rage was such as to render her helpless, and the boy would run away from her and laugh at her. At last Dr. Glennie, the master of his school, appealed to Lord Carlisle, the legal guardian of the boy, and besought him to interfere. Supported by the guardian's authority, he denied him the privilege of going home on Saturday; whereupon Mrs. Byron, indignant at being deprived of the society of her son, would go to the school, and pour out such a storm of invective in the doctor's parlor, that the boys in the school-room would hear her, to the great shame of the young lord. The schoolmaster once overheard a boy say to him :

"Byron, your mother is a fool."

"I know it," was his sad reply.

When we think of this fatherless boy, with the blood of the Byrons in his veins, subjected to the fondness and violence of this foolish mother, we ought to wonder, not that he was so wild and ignoble a man, but that there was any good in him at all. There was much good in him. One of his school-fellows at Harrow was the great Sir Robert Peel, who used to relate an anecdote of Byron that does him much honor. A great bully was tormenting little Peel most cruelly one day, by inflicting blows with a stick upon the inside flesh of one of his arms, which the brute twisted round for the purpose. Byron chanced to see his little friend writhing under the torture, and was half convulsed with rage and pity. Unable to fight the tormentor, he came up to him, with tears rolling down his face, red with fury, and said in a low, humble tone :

"How many stripes do you mean to inflict?"

"Why, you little rascal," roared the bully, "what is that to you?"

'Because, if you please," said Byron, holding up his arm. "I will take half."

He was, like his mother, apt to be violent in all things, even in his attachment to other school-boys. We have one of his school letters, in which he reproaches one of his friends for beginning his last letter "My dear Byron," instead of "My dearest Byron." In the defence of his friends he was a very valiant champion. One of them being weak from a recent sickness, was ill fitted to fight his way in a great concourse of rough boys, and Byron said to him:

"Harness, if any one bullies you, tell me, and I'll thrash hin if I can."

He kept his word, and the two boys remained fast friends for many years.

At college he was still a desultory student, an omniverous reader, an ardent friend, and a devotce of active sports. He became, through incessant practice, an excellent shot, an expert boatman, and one of the best swimmers in Europe, and, as he grew to manhood, he became exceedingly handsome. His col