George Gordon, the only son of Captain John Byron, by his second wife,
Miss Gordon, of Gight, and grandson of the celebrated Admiral Byron,
was born in Holles Street, London, on the 22d of January, 1788. His
ancestry, of which he is said to have been more proud than of having
been the author of Childe Harold and Manfred, was composed of persons
of distinction, but possessing much of that daring recklessness of
character which so early displayed itself in the subject of our
memoir. His great uncle, Lord William, to whom he succeeded, was tried
for killing his relation, Mr. Chaworth, in a duel; and his father, who
had caused his first wife to die of a broken heart, after having
seduced her, when Marchioness of Carmarthen, became the husband of our
poet’s mother, as he openly avowed, for her fortune alone; after the
dissipation of which, he separated from her, and died at Valenciennes,
in 1791. At this time, young Byron resided, with his mother, at
Aberdeen, where in November, 1792, he was sent to a day school; but,
according to his own account, ‘learned little there, except to repeat
by rote the first lesson of monosyllables.’ After remaining a year in
this school, he was placed with a clergyman, named Ross, under whom,
he says, he made astonishing progress; and observes, that the moment
he could read, his grand passion was history. His next tutor was named
Paterson; with him, he adds, ‘I began Latin in Ruddiman’s grammar, and
continued till I went to the grammar-school, where I threaded all the
classes to the fourth, when I was recalled to England by the demise of
my uncle.
The anecdotes which are told of him at this time, display his temper
in an unfavorable light, both in his infancy and boyhood. Mr. Moore
relates, that whilst yet in petticoats, being angrily reprimanded by
his nurse for having soiled or torn a new frock, in which he had just
been dressed, he got into one of his ‘silent rages’ (as he himself has
described them), seized the frock with both his hands, rent it from
top to bottom, and stood, in sullen stillness, setting his censurer
and her wrath at defiance. The same authority tells us, that once, in
returning home from school at Aberdeen, Byron fell in with a boy who
had, on some former occasion, insulted him, but had then got off
unpunished; little Byron, however, at the time, promising to ‘pay him
off’ whenever they should meet again. Accordingly, on this second
encounter, though there were some other boys to take his opponent’s
part, he succeeded in inflicting upon him a hearty beating. On his
return home, breathless, the servant inquired what he had been about,
and was answered by him, with a mixture of rage and humor, that he had
been paying a debt, by beating a boy according to promise; for that he
was a Byron and would not belie his motto. Other anecdotes are told of
him, which show him to have been passionate and resentful to that
degree, as to leave it doubtful whether the description of him as ‘a
malignant imp’ is not more applicable to his early years, than that of
‘a lively, warm-hearted, and high-spirited boy.’ Before closing our
account of his infancy, we should not omit to state that he suffered
much from the malformation of one of his feet, which gave him much
pain and mortification throughout his life. Even when a child, an
allusion to this infirmity so provoked him, that he once struck at a
person who remarked it, with a little whip which he held in his hand,
exclaiming impatiently, as his eyes flashed fire, ‘Dinna speak of it!’
He himself says, in some memoranda of his early days, that he never
felt greater horror and humiliation than when his mother, in one of
her fits of passion, called him a ‘lame brat:’ and it is certain, that
he always felt it as a sort of ignominy, notwithstanding Mr. Moore’s
assertion that in after-life, ‘he could sometimes talk indifferently,
and even jestingly, of this lameness.’ His attachment to Mary Duff
commenced when he was only eight years of age; but, though, eight
years afterwards, the account of her marriage with another, ‘nearly
threw him into convulsions,’ and for a while embittered his existence,
it was, he adds, ‘the recollection, not the attachment, which
afterwards recurred to me so forcibly.’ This affection, however, was
not without its influence upon his mind, and probably tended to
increase that love of contemplation and solitude, which he is said to
have sometimes carried to a dangerous excess among the mountainous
scenery of the highlands.
In 1798, he prepared to quit Scotland for Newstead, in consequence of
his accession to his family title, of which, perhaps, he was not a
little proud; for his mother having said to him, some time in the
previous year, whilst perusing a newspaper, that she hoped to have the
pleasure of some time or other reading his speeches in the house of
commons; he replied, ‘I hope not; if you read any speeches of mine, it
will be in the house of lords.’ On his arrival at Newstead, he
continued his studies under Mr. Rogers, a schoolmaster in the
neighborhood, and was also attended by a quack of the name of
Lavender, who had undertaken to cure the defect in his foot. Of this
man he had a great abhorrence, and took every opportunity of
ridiculing him; and, about the same time, the first symptom of his
predilection for rhyming showed itself in four lines of doggerel,
respecting an old woman who had given him some offense. In 1799, he
was removed to London; and at the suggestion of his guardian, the Earl
of Carlisle, placed under the care of Dr. Baillie, who also attended
him on his subsequent removal to the school of Dr. Glennie, at
Dulwich, where he appears to have gained the esteem both of his master
and schoolfellows. His reading in history and poetry, says Dr.
Glennie, was far beyond the usual standard of his age; and ‘he showed
an intimate accquaintance with the historical parts of Holy
Scriptures;’ an assertion which serves to confirm the subsequent
declaration of Byron himself, ‘that he was a great reader and admirer
of the Old Testament, and had read it through and through before he
was eight years old.’ The progress he was rapidly making under Dr.
Glennie was, unfortunately, interrupted by the foolish indulgence of
his mother, who took him home so frequently, and behaved with so much
violence when remonstrated with on the subject, that lord Carlisle
determined upon removing his ward to Harrow, whither he was sent in
his fourteenth year.
In 1800, he had, as he expresses himself, made ‘his first dash into
poetry; the ebullition,’ he adds ‘of a passion for my first cousin,
Margaret Parker, one of the most beautiful of evanescent beings.’ This
was succeeded by his attachment for Miss Mary Chaworth, whom he used
to meet during the Harrow vacations; she was two years older than
himself, and does not appear to have given sufficient encouragement to
his addresses, to warrant his declaration ‘that she jilted him:’
especially as she was, at the time of their first acquaintance,
engaged to Mr. Musters, whom she subsequently married. There is no
doubt, however, that his affection for the lady (who is now dead) was
sincere, and that the loss of her had an embittering influence upon
his future life. A person, who was present when Miss Chaworth’s
marriage was first announced to him, has thus described the scene that
occurred:――‘Byron, I have some news for you,’ said his mother. ‘Well,
what is it?’ ‘Take out our handkerchief first, you will want it.’
‘Nonsense!’ ‘Take out your handkerchief, I say.’ He did so, to humor
her. ‘Miss Chaworth is married.’ An expression very peculiar,
impossible to describe, passed over his pale face, and he hurried his
handkerchief into his pocket; saying with an affected air of coldness
and nonchalance, ‘Is that all?’ ‘Why, I expected,’ said his mother,
‘you would have been plunged into grief.’ He made no reply, and soon
began to talk about something else.
This took place in 1805, the year of his leaving Harrow, which he
quitted with the character of a plain-spoken, clever and undaunted,
but idle boy. His master, Dr. Drury, for whom he always entertained
respect and affection, spoke of him as one who ‘might be led by a
silken string to a point, rather than by a cable;’ and being asked his
opinion of his pupil, after some continuance at Harrow, by lord
Carlisle, he replied, that ‘he had talents which would add lustre to
his rank.’ Though generally, however, reputed to be too indolent to
excel in school, it seems that he collected a vast fund of
information, which was little suspected by those who saw him only when
idle, in mischief, or at play. ‘The truth is,’ he says, ‘that I read
eating, read in bed, read when no one else read, and had read all
sorts of reading since I was five years old, though I never met with a
review till I was in my nineteenth year.’ He was not, at first, liked
by his schoolfellows; but with some of them he ultimately formed
friendships, to which he always reverted with a melancholy delight,
broken, as most of them were, by his own waywardness, or the peculiar
circumstances which attended his subsequent career.
His intrepidity was shown in several pugilistic combats, many of which
he undertook in the defense and protection of other boys. One of his
schoolfellows says, that he has seen him fight by the hour like a
Trojan, and stand up, against the disadvantages of his lameness, with
all the spirit of an ancient combatant. On the same person’s reminding
him of his battle with Pitt, he replied, ‘You are mistaken, I think;
it must have been with Rice-pudding Morgan, or Lord Jocelyn, or one of
the Douglases, or George Raynsford, or Pryce (with whom I had two
conflicts), or with Moses Moore (the clod), or with somebody else, and
not with Pitt; for with all the above-named, and other worthies of the
fist, had I an interchange of black eyes and bloody noses, at various
and sundry periods. However, it may have happened, for all that.’ He
also told Captain Medwin, in allusion to two of his actions at Harrow,
that he fought Lord Calthorpe for writing ‘D――d atheist’ under his
name; and prevented the school-room from being burnt, during a
rebellion, by pointing out to the boys the names of their fathers and
grandfathers on the walls.
In 1805, he was entered of Trinity College, Cambridge, which he
describes as ‘a new and heavy-hearted scene to him;’ adding, it was
one of the deadliest and heaviest feelings of his life, to feel that
he was no longer a boy. His chief ambition seems to have been to
attain the reputation of a rake and a spendthrift; and his principal
fear, lest he should become too fat, to prevent which, he took as much
violent exercise as his naturally delicate constitution would allow.
Among other of his eccentricities, for which he was more remarkable
than his profligacy, though he seemed to take a pride in exaggerating
the latter, it is said that he kept a bear, with the intention, as he
observed, of training it up for a degree. The time not passed by him
at the university, he at first spent with his mother, at Southwell,
but her violent temper, which his own was not calculated to appease,
soon led to their separation; and he afterwards resided in London,
Little Hampton, Harrowgate, and other places of fashionable resort. At
this period, he is said to have been remarkably bashful, though he
subsequently so far overcame his shyness, as to take a prominent part
in some private theatricals at Southwell. In November, 1807, his Hours
of Idleness was printed at Newark; and, in the following year,
appeared the memorable criticism upon them in The Edinburgh Review,
which was decidedly unjust, though few, perhaps, will agree with the
subject of our memoir, that these poems were as good as any he ever
produced. The impression which the ciriticism above-mentioned made
upon our poet, is described, by one who witnessed his fierce looks of
defiance, during a first perusal of it, as fearful and sublime. Among
the less sentimental effects of this review upon his mind, says Mr.
Moore, he used to mention that, on the day he read it, he drank three
bottles of claret to his own share after dinner; that nothing,
however, relieved him till he had given vent to his indignation in
rhyme; and that ‘after the first twenty lines, he felt himself
considerably better.’ During the progress of the satire, he passed his
time alternately at Newstead, London, and Brighton, where he took
lessons in boxing, and appeared in public with a mistress who
accompanied him, dressed in boy’s clothes, and whom he introduced as
his young brother.
On coming of age, in 1809, he apprised Lord Carlisle of his wish to
take his seat in the house of peers; and to the formal reply of the
earl, and his refusal to afford any information respecting the
marriage of our poet’s grandfather, is owing the bitterness with which
he attacked the former in his English Bards. He at length took his
seat on the 13th of March, and went down to the house for that
purpose, accompanied only by Mr. Dallas, whom he had accidentally met.
‘He was received,’ says that gentleman, ‘in one of the ante-chambers,
by some of the officers in attendance, with whom he settled
respecting the fees he had to pay: one of them went to apprise the
lord-chancellor of his being there, and soon returned for him. There
were very few persons in the house. Lord Eldon was going through some
ordinary business. When Lord Byron entered, I thought he looked still
paler than before; and he certainly wore a countenance in which
mortification was mingled with, but subdued by, indignation. He passed
the woolsack without looking round, and advanced to the table, where
the proper officer was attending to administer the oaths. When he had
gone through them, the chancellor quitted his seat, and went towards
him with a smile, putting out his hand warmly to welcome him; and,
though I did not catch his words, I saw that he paid him some
compliment. This was all thrown away upon Lord Byron, who made a stiff
bow, and put the tips of his fingers into Lord Eldon’s hand. The
chancellor did not press a welcome so received, but resumed his seat;
while Lord Byron carelessly seated himself, for a few minutes, on one
of the empty benches to the left of the throne, usually occupied by
the lords in opposition. When, on his joining me, I expressed what I
had felt, he said, “If I had shaken hands heartily, he would have set
me down for one of his party; but I will have nothing to do with any
of them, on either side: I have taken my seat, and now I will go
abroad.” We returned to St. James’ Street, but he did not recover his
spirits.’ Another account states that he offended the chancellor by
replying to him, when he apologized for requiring the evidence of
Admiral Byron’s marriage, as being a part of his duty: ‘Your lordship
was exactly like Tom Thumb; you did your duty, and nothing more.’
Shortly after he had taken his seat, his satire was published
anonymously, of which, though the success, at the time, highly
gratified him, he, some years afterwards, wrote, ‘Nothing but the
consideration of its being the property of another, prevents me from
consigning this miserable record of misplaced and indiscriminate anger
to the flames.’ Before a second edition was published, he left
England, accompanied by Mr. Hobhouse, under the influence of those
melancholy feelings, which he has described in the early part of the
first canto of Childe Harold, in which poem a pretty accurate account
of his travels is given, during his two years’ residence abroad.
Almost every event he met with, he has made subservient to his muse,
particularly the incident on which is founded his Giaour, and it was
during this tour that he swam from Sestos to Abydos.
In July, 1811, he returned to England, and being visited by Mr.
Dallas, put into his hands a Paraphrase of Horace’s Art of Poetry,
expressing a wish that it should be printed under the latter’s
superintendence; but he mentioned nothing of Childe Harold’s
Pilgrimage, until Mr. Dallas expressed his surprise that he should
have written so little during his absence. He then told his friend
that ‘he had occasionally written short poems, besides a great many
stanzas in Spenser’s measure, relative to the countries he had
visited;’ and, at the same time, handed them to Mr. Dallas, observing,
that they were not worth troubling him with. This gentleman had no
sooner perused the poem, than he endeavored to persuade the author of
its superiority, in every respect, to the Paraphrase of Horace; but it
was not until after much real or affected reluctance, that he
consented to the publication of Childe Harold, in preference to that
of the former. He had scarcely made up his mind on the subject, before
he was called to Newstead, by the illness of his mother, who, however,
died a short time before his arrival, on the 1st of August. He is said
to have been sincerely affected at her loss; and, on being found
sitting near the corpse of his mother, by Mrs. Byron’s waiting-woman,
he, in answer to her remonstrance with him for so giving way to grief,
exclaimed, bursting into tears, ‘I had but one friend in the world,
and she is gone!’ His subsequent conduct, however, had an eccentricity
about it, which brought the sincerity of his grief into question:――‘On
the morning of the funeral,’ says Mr. Moore, ‘having declined
following the remains himself, he stood looking, from the abbey door,
at the procession, till the whole had moved off; then turning to young
Rushton, who was the only person left besides himself, he desired him
to fetch the sparring gloves, and proceeded to his usual exercise with
the boy. He was silent and abstracted all the time; and, as if from an
effort to get the better of his feelings, threw more violence, Rushton
thought, in his blows than was his habit; but, at last,――the struggle
seeming too much for him,――he flung away the gloves, and retired to
his room.’
A few months after the death of his mother, a correspondence took
place between himself and Mr. Moore, the poet, of whose duel with Mr.
Jeffrey, Byron had given a ludicrous, but untrue, account in his
English Bards. After several letters of an explanatory, rather than
hostile, nature, had passed on both sides, and in which each exhibited
a manly and forbearing spirit, they became mutual friends, and
remained so ever afterwards. On the 27th of February, 1812, Lord Byron
made his first speech in the house of lords, on the subject of the
Nottingham Frame-breaking Bill, and appears to have pleased both
himself and his hearers. Mr. Dallas, who met him coming out of the
house, says, that he was greatly elated; and, after repeating some of
the compliments which had been paid him, concluded by saying, ‘that he
had, by his speech, given the best advertisement for Childe Harold’s
Pilgrimage,’ which was two days afterwards published. The effect upon
the public, as his biographer observes, was electric; as he has
himself said, in his memoranda, ‘he awoke one morning, and found
himself famous.’ The first edition of his work was disposed of
instantly; ‘Childe Harold,’ and ‘Lord Byron,’ were the theme of every
tongue; the most eminent literati of the day, including many whom he
had attacked in his satire, left their names at his door; upon his
table lay the epistolary tribute of the statesman and philosopher, the
billet of some incognita, or the pressing note of some fair leader of
fashion; and, in fine, ‘he found himself among the illustrious crowds
of high life, the most distinguished object.’ The sum of £600 which he
received for the copyright of the poem, he presented to Mr. Dallas;
observing, ‘he would never receive money for his writings;’ a
resolution which he subsequently abandoned. Among other results of the
fame he had acquired by his Childe Harold, was his introduction to the
prince regent, which took place at a ball, at the request of his royal
highness, whose conversation so fascinated the poet, that had it not
been, says Mr. Dallas, for an accidental deferring of the next levee,
he bade fair to become a visitor at Carlton House, if not a complete
courtier.
In the spring of 1813, he published, anonymously, his poem on
waltzing; and as it was not received with the applause he anticipated,
did not avow himself to be its author. In the same year, appeared The
Giaour, and The Bride of Abydos; the former of which reached a fifth
edition in four months. Mr. Murray offered him a thousand guineas for
the copyright of the two poems, but he still refused to derive any
pecuniary benefit from his writings. In 1814, his Corsair was
published; the copyright of which he presented to Mr. Dallas. Fourteen
thousand copies of the poem were sold in one day; but the popularity
which this and his other works had procured for him, began to be
lessened by his verses to the Princess Charlotte, and by a certain
peculiarity of conduct which was looked upon as more indecorous than
eccentric. Under these circumstances, he was persuaded to marry, and,
in consequence, proposed to Miss Milbanke, the daughter of Sir Ralph
Milbanke; but was at first met with a polite refusal. He was however,
not so much mortified as not to make her a second offer, though he
says, in his memoranda, that a friend strongly advised him against
doing so; observing that Miss Milbanke had, at present, no fortune,
and that his embarrassed affairs would not allow him to marry without
one; that she was, moreover, a learned lady, which would not at all
suit him.’ He then agreed that his friend should write a proposal for
him to another lady, and a refusal being the consequence, he said,
‘you see, after all, Miss Milbanke is to be the person: I will write
to her:’ which he accordingly did, and was accepted. His marriage took
place at Seaham, on the 2d of January, 1815; a day to which he seems
to have always reverted with a shudder, and on which he, in reality,
perhaps, experienced those emotions so touchingly described in his
beautiful poem of The Dream. Superstition had, no doubt, some
influence over his mind on the occasion; for, in addition to the
circumstances hereafter related in his own words, he fancied, a short
time previous to his marriage, that he had seen, at Newstead, the
ghost of the monk which was supposed to haunt the abbey, and to appear
when misfortune impended over the mansion,――a legend which he was
versified in the sixteenth canto of Don Juan. His own memoranda
relative to his union form an interesting prelude to its unhappy
consequences. ‘It had been predicted by Mrs. Williams,’ says he, ‘that
twenty-seven was to be the dangerous age for me. The fortune-telling
which was right: it was destined to prove so. I shall never forget the
2d of January. Lady Byron was the only unconcerned person present:
Lady Noel, her mother, cried: I trembled like a leaf, made the wrong
responses, and after the ceremony called her Miss Milbanke. There is a
singular history attached to the ring:――the very day the match was
concluded, a ring of my mother’s that had been lost, was dug up by the
gardener at Newstead. I thought it was sent on purpose for the
wedding; but my mother’s marriage had not been a fortunate one, and
this ring was doomed to be the seal of an unhappier union still. After
the ordeal was over, we set off for a country seat of Sir Ralph’s; and
I was surprised at the arrangements for the journey, and somewhat out
of humor to find a lady’s maid stuck between me and my bride. It was
rather too early to assume the husband, so I was forced to submit; but
it was not with a very good grace. I have been accused of saying, on
getting into the carriage, that I had married Lady Byron out of spite,
and because she had refused me twice. Though I was, for a moment,
vexed at the prophecy, or whatever you may choose to call it, if I had
made so uncavalier, not to say brutal, a speech, I am convinced Lady
Byron would instantly have left the carriage to me and the maid. She
had spirit enough to have done so, and would properly have resented
the insult. Our honeymoon was not all sunshine; it had its clouds; and
Hobhouse has some letters which would serve to explain the rise and
fall in the barometer; but it was never down at zero.’
About ten months after his marriage, the birth of his daughter took
place; an event that was, in a few weeks, followed by a total
separation of the parents. So many various reasons have been assigned
for this step, by the friends of either party, and so much more than
has yet come to light, has been insinuated by Lady Byron herself, that
the real cause of their continued disunion still remains a mystery.
Our poet has avowed, both in his conversation and correspondence,
that, during his residence with his wife, he had nothing to complain
of; and it was only when he found her unwilling to resume her
connection with him that he gave vent to that bitterness of spirit
with which he alludes to her in some of his poems. Mr. Moore speaks
with all evident bias in favor of the subject of his biography; but
whatever inferences may be drawn from the sacrifice of the papers
relating to this affair, at the request of Lady Byron’s family,――and
the previous request of the lady herself to her husband, that he would
not publish them, on his sending them to her for perusal, which she
declined,――it is clear, from the facts that have as yet been made
public, that the conduct of Lord Byron was at least as culpable, as
that of his wife appears, in the absence of further explanation, to
have been extraordinary. Many excuses, however, are to be made for the
subject of our memoir, who was most unwarrantably calumniated on the
occasion, and publicly taxed with crimes, of which conjugal infidelity
was not the least, though, perhaps, at the time of its imputation, the
most unjustifiable. The ostensible cause of their separation was the
involvement of his lordship’s affairs, and his connexion with the
managing committee of Drury Lane, which led him into a course of life
unsuitable to the domestic habits of Lady Byron. ‘My income, at this
period,’ says his own account of the affair, ‘was small, and somewhat
bespoken. We had a house in town, gave dinner parties, had separate
carriages, and launched into every sort of extravagance. This could
not last long. My wife’s £10,000 soon melted away. I was beset by
duns, and at length, an execution was levied, and the bailiffs put in
possession of the very beds we had to sleep on. This was no very
agreeable state of affairs, no very pleasant scene for Lady Byron to
witness; and it was agreed she should pay her father a visit till the
storm had blown over, and some arangements had been made with my
creditors.’
The lady, however, expressed her determination never to return to him,
in a letter which had been preceded by one, beginning, as he
ludicrously says, ‘dear duck!’ ‘You asked me,’ he says in a
communication to Captain Medwin, ‘if no cause was assigned for this
sudden resolution?――if I formed no conjecture about the cause? I will
tell you: I have prejudices about women; I do not like to see them
eat. Rousseau makes Julie un peu gourmande; but that is not at all
according to my taste. I do not like to be interrupted when I am
writing. Lady Byron did not attend to these whims of mine. The only
harsh thing I ever remember saying to her was, one evening, shortly
before our parting. I was standing before the fire, ruminating upon
the embarrassment of my affairs, and other annoyances, when Lady Byron
came up to me, and said, “Byron, am I in your way?” to which I
replied, “D――――bly!” I was sorry, and reproached myself for the
expression; but it escaped me unconsciously,――involuntarily: I hardly
knew what I said.’
His lordship’s next poems were, Lara, The Siege of Corinth, and
Parisina; the two last of which appeared in February, 1816; and, in
the following April, he again left England, having previously
published The Sketch, and his celebrated Fare-thee-well. He set out
upon his travels in no very dejected state of mind, which may be
accounted for by an observation in one of his letters, that ‘agitation
or contest of any kind gave a rebound to his spirits, and set him up
for the time.’ After reaching France, he crossed the field of
Waterloo, and proceeded by the Rhine, to Switzerland, where he became
acquainted with Shelley; and, whilst at Geneva, began the composition
of a poem founded on his recent separation; but hearing that his wife
was ill, he threw the manuscript into the fire. From Switzerland he
proceeded to Italy, where he resided principally at Venice, and
transmitted thence to London his third and fourth cantos of Childe
Harold, the Prisoner of Chillon, and other poems, Manfred, and The
Lament of Tasso. He also wrote, in that city, his Ode to Venice, and
Beppo, which he is said to have finished at a sitting. His mode of
living is accurately described in his own letters from Italy, which
show him to have been equally candid and shameless in the confession
of his amours. The first connexion he formed was with the wife of a
linen-draper, in whose house he lodged; and highly censurable, says
Mr. Moore, as was his course of life, while under the roof of this
woman, ‘it was venial, in comparison with the strange, head-long
career of license, to which he subsequently so unrestrainedly and
defyingly abandoned himself.’ It will be unnecessary, after this
admission from his most partial biographer, to say more than, that,
after a gross and degrading course of libertinism, his desires were
contracted into a passion for the Countess Guiccioli; with whom he
first became acquainted in the April of 1819, and, in a few months, he
became her acknowledged paramour. In the same year he was visited, at
Venice, by Mr. Moore, to whom he made a present of the memoirs, which
have been before alluded to. He brought them in, says Mr. Moore, one
day, in a white leather bag, and holding it up, said, ‘look here; this
would be worth something to Murray, though you, I dare say, would not
give sixpence for it.’――‘What is it?’――‘My life and adventures:――it is
not a thing that can be published during my life-time, but you may
have it, if you like,――there, do whatever you please with it.’ In
giving the bag, continues Mr. Moore, he added, ‘you may show it to any
of our friends you think worthy of it.’
The Countess Guiccioli having gone back to Ravenna, at her husband’s
desire, lord Byron was about to return to England, when a letter from
his inamorata changed his mind, and he resumed his connexion with her,
on her separation from her husband, which took place, on an
understanding that she should in future reside with her father, Count
Gamba. She acoordingly, in July 1820, removed from Ravenna to the
count’s villa, a distance of about fifteen miles from the city, where
our poet now took up his abode, visiting Madam Guiccioli once or twice
in a month. After he had been about a twelvemonth at Ravenna, the
state of the country began to render it unsafe for him to remain there
any longer; and the Gambas (the father and brother of the Countess
Guiccioli) having been exiled, he was induced to remove with them to
Pisa, in the autumn of 1821. It appears, that he was himself suspected
of having secretly joined the Carbonari; but, though such was the
fact, and he had received warnings to discontinue his forest rides,
he, as he observes, ‘was not to be bullied,’ and did not quit Ravenna
till he had shown the authorites he was not afraid of remaining. His
poetical productions, within the three last years, were, Mazeppa, his
tragedies of Marino Faliero, the Two Foscari, and Sardanapalus, The
Prophecy of Dante, Cain, and several cantos of Don Juan, the sixteenth
canto of which he completed at Pisa. At this place he also wrote
Werner, The Deformed Transformed, Heaven and Earth, and the celebrated
Vision of Judgment; the two last of which appeared in The Liberal, the
joint production of himself, Mr. Shelley, and Mr. Leigh Hunt, who had
joined his lordship at Pisa. Of this periodical it is unnecessary to
say more, in this, place, than that it failed after the fourth number,
and gave rise to a prosecution against the publisher, on account of
The Vision of Judgment.
An affray with some soldiers of Pisa, who, for some reason or other,
had attempted to arrest our poet, and some other Englishmen, induced
him to remove, with the Gambas, to Leghorn, and, subsequently, to
Geneva, where he took up his residence, in September, 1822. The fervor
of his attachment had now, probably, declined towards the Countess
Guiccioli; and, anxious for more stirring scenes than those in which
he had hitherto mixed, he engaged in a correspondence with the leaders
of the insurrection in Greece, which ended in his departure for that
country, in the summer of 1823. He has been censured by some for
quitting Italy without having made a provision for his mistress, but
it seems that she had refused to accept of any: upon what terms they
parted is doubtful; for according to Mr. Galt, a friend of his was
told, by the lady herself, ‘that she had not come to hate lord Byron,
but she feared more than loved him.’ Her brother, however, Count
Gamba, accompanied his lordship to Cephalonia, where he equipped forty
Suliotes to assist in the defense of Missolonghi, and undertook to
provide a loan of £12,000 for the equipment of a fleet against the
Turks.
In the beginning of January 1824, he entered Missolonghi, where the
inhabitants, who hailed his coming as that of a Messiah, received him
with enthusiastic demonstrations of respect and applause. He began by
attempting to induce the Greeks to a more civilized system of warfare
than had been lately carried on; and, with this view, he not only
personally rescued a Turk from some Greek sailors, on the very day of
his landing, but released several prisoners in the town, and sent them
back to Prevesa, in the hope that it would beget a similar mode of
treatment towards the captives in the hands of the Turks. He then
formed a brigade of Suliotes, five hundred of whom he took into his
pay; and ‘burning,’ says Colonel Stanhope, ‘with military ardor and
chivalry, prepared to lead them to Lepanto.’ The insubordination,
however, among the troops, and the differences that hourly arose amid
the half-famished and ill-accoutred garrison, rendered this step
impracticable, and threw him into a state of feverish irritation, that
destroyed his self-possession at a time when it was most necessary to
the cause he was struggling to serve. An attack of epilepsy was the
consequence of this state of mind, and on his recovery, he was
strongly urged to remove, for a while, from the marshy and deleterious
air of Missolonghi. This he indignantly refused to do; ‘I will remain
here,’ he said, to Captain Parry, ‘until Greece is secure against the
Turks, or till she has fallen under their power. All my income shall
be spent in her service; but, unless driven by some great necessity, I
will not touch a farthing of the sum intended for my sister’s
children. When Greece is secure against external enemies, I will leave
the Greeks to settle their government as they like. One service more,
and an eminent service it will be, I think I may perform for them. You
Parry, shall have a schooner built for me, or I will buy a vessel; the
Greeks shall invest me with the character of their ambassador, or
agent: I will go to the United States, and procure that free and
enlightened government to set the example of recognizing the
federation of Greece as an independent state. This done, England must
follow the example, and Greece will then enter into all her rights as
a member of the great commonwealth of Christian Europe.’
This was the last ebullition of a mind which was now tottering to its
final decadence; though it occasionally broke out in those meteor-like
flashes, which had belonged to its early vigor. On the 12th of April,
a fever, of whose premonitory symptoms he had not been sufficiently
heedful, confined him to his bed, and his physician, Dr. Bruno,
proposed bleeding him, as the only means of saving his life. This,
however, he repeatedly refused; declaring, that he had only a common
cold, and that he would not permit the doctor to bleed him for the
mere purpose of getting the reputation of curing his disease. At
length, on the 14th, after some controversy among the physicians, who
now all saw the necessity of bleeding, he consented to the operation;
and also on the 16th, saying as he stretched out his arm, ‘I fear they
know nothing about my disorder; but, here, take my arm, and do
whatever you like.’ On the 17th, his countenance changed, and he
became slightly delirious; he complained that the want of sleep would
drive him mad; ‘and,’ he exclaimed to his valet, Fletcher, ‘I would
ten times sooner shoot myself than be mad; for I am not afraid of
dying――I am more fit to die than people imagine.’ It was not, however,
till the 18th, that he began to think himself in danger, when he
called Fletcher to his bed-side, and bid him receive his last
instructions. ‘Shall I fetch pen, ink, and paper?’ said the valet, as
he approached; ‘Oh, my God! no;’ was his reply; ‘you will lose too
much time, and I have it not to spare.’ He then exclaimed, ‘Oh! my
poor dear child!――my dear Ada――could I have but seen her――give her my
blessing.’ And, after muttering something unintelligibly, he suddenly
raised his voice, and said, ‘Fletcher, now, if you do not execute
every order which I have given you, I will torment you hereafter, if
possible.’ The valet replying that he had not understood one word of
what his lordship had been saying, ‘Oh, my God?’ he exclaimed, ‘then
all is lost, for it is now too late, and all is over: yet, as you say,
God’s will, not mine, be done――but, I will try to――my wife! my child!
my sister!――you know all――you must say all――you know my wishes.’ Here
his words became unintelligible. Stimulants were now, in direct
opposition to the opinion of Dr. Bruno, administered to him, after
taking which, he said, ‘I must sleep now,’ and never spoke again. For
twenty-four hours he lay in a state of lethargy, with the rattles
occasionally in his throat; and at six o’clock in the evening of the
19th, an exclamation of Fletcher, who saw him open and then shut his
eyes, without moving hand or foot, announced that his master was no
more.
The death of lord Byron created a mournful sensation in all parts of
the civilized world; his failings were forgotten in his recent
struggles for the delivery of Greece, and one universal sound of
admiration and regret was echoed throughout Europe. The authorities of
Missolonghi paid every token of respect to his memory that reverence
could suggest, and before his remains were deposited in their final
resting place, some of the most celebrated men of the present century
had, in glowing terms, expressed their sense of his merits. His body
after having been brought to England, and refused interment in
Westminster Abbey and St. Paul’s, was conveyed to Hucknell church,
near Newstead, in conformity to a wish of the poet, that his dust
might be mingled with his mother’s. As the procession passed through
the streets of London, a sailor was observed walking, uncovered, near
the hearse, and on being asked what he was doing there, replied, that
he had served lord Byron in the Levant, and had come to pay his last
respects to his remains; ‘a simple but emphatic testimony,’ observes
Mr. Galt, ‘to the sincerity of that regard which his lordship often
inspired, and which, with more steadiness, he might always have
commanded.’
The character of lord Byron has, of late years, been so frequently and
elaborately discussed, that a lengthened dissertation upon it, in this
place would be equally tedious and superfluous. Its best development
is furnished by his memoirs, and having read these, we may, without
fear of controversy, come to the conclusion, that in regard to his
relation to society he was neither a great nor a good man. Had he been
desirous of becoming so, it was not impossible for him to have
succeeded; the path of rectitude was not a greater mystery to him than
to other men; and the metaphysical subtlety that has been employed to
prove him the possessor of high and virtuous principles, only shows
how far he has diverged from the track to which his panegyrists would
wish to restore him. It has been said, that he was not driven to
profligacy by inclination, but was goaded into it by the world’s
attributing to him vices of which he was not guilty, but which he in
consequence, out of scorn and defiance, chose to commit. ‘I took,’ he
himself says, ‘my gradation in the vices with great promptitude, but
they were not to my taste; I could not be a libertine without disgust;
and yet this very disgust, and my heart thrown back upon itself, threw
me into excesses, perhaps, more fatal than those from which I shrank.’
This is a metaphysical apology, calculated, perhaps, to mystify the
judgment, and cajole the sympathies, of a portion of mankind, towards
him by whom it is put forth; but, surely, it is nothing more than the
reckless avowal of a perverted and a depraved mind, too indolent, too
weak, or too proud, to adopt any other mode of blunting the sting of
one vice, than by plunging into another still more odious. We confess
we are not among those who see in the circumstances of his lordship’s
life sufficient reason for that waywardness of mind and conduct, of
which his poetical and moral character form so singular a combination;
and from which, after all, he only averts our contempt, by investing
it with an aspect that disdains our pity. Lord Byron is not the only
sensitive young man who has entered upon life with blighted hopes, but
it is doubtful whether the remembrance of them would be accepted as an
apology for a similar career to that of his lordship, even though the
sufferer possessed not the faculty of venting his anguish in verse,
the opportunity of drowning it in dissipation, or the means and
leisure of softening it by travel and amusement.
The subject of our memoir, however, was not without redeeming
qualities: he was brave, generous and benevolent; but he was also
passionate, disingenuous, and resentful; and more ready to inflict a
wound, than to submit to one himself. He was sensitive to a painful
degree, both in his sentiments, and his feelings; but, though he
writhed under an attack upon either, his pride hindered him from
showing what he suffered, even when such emotions proceeded from
impulses the most honorable to human nature. He certainly took
pleasure in showing the dark side of his character to the world; for
those who were admitted to an unreserved intimacy with him, give
indubitable testimony of his possessing, in a very eminent degree, all
the social and companionable qualities, a heart exquisitely alive to
the kindness of others towards himself, and a hand unhesitatingly
prompt in complying with the supplications of distress. There is,
indeed, no reason to doubt his own allegation (for falsehood was not
one of his characteristics) when he says, ‘If salvation is to be
bought by charity, I have given more to my fellow-creatures in this
life, than I now possess. I never in my life, gave a mistress so much
as I have some times given a poor honest man in distress.’ Captain
Medwin describes him as the best of masters, and as being perfectly
adored by his servants, to whose families and children he also
extended an affectionate kindness. His habits, in the latter part of
his life, were regular and temperate, even to ascetic abstinence; he
seldom ate meat or drank wine, living chiefly upon biscuits, coffee,
eggs, fish, vegetables, and soda water, of which he has been
known to drink fifteen bottles in a night. Riding, swimming, and
pistol-shooting, were his favorite amusements; and one of three things
which he used to pride himself upon, was his ability to snuff out a
candle with a bullet, at twenty yards distance;――the other two were,
his feat of swimming across the Hellespont, and being the author of a
poem (The Corsair), of which fourteen thousand copies were sold in one
day. He had a great partiality for children; and, besides the
affection he always manifested for his child Ada, he is said to have
felt severely the loss of a natural daughter, born in 1817, and who
died at five years of age. Prejudice, affectation, and vanity,
displayed themselves in many parts of his conduct; he would talk of
avoiding Shakspeare, lest he should be thought to owe him any thing;
and delighted in the addition of Noel to his name, because, as he
said, Bonaparte and he were the only public persons whose initials
were the same; peculiarities which induced Mr. Hazlitt to call him ‘a
sublime coxcomb.’ His pride of birth we have before alluded to: it
would probably have been somewhat diminished, had he been aware of the
singular fact of a baton sinister being in the escutcheon of his
family. Though he professed to despise the opinion of the world, no
man was a greater slave to it, in some respects, than himself.
Speaking of duelling, he would say, ‘we must act according to usages;
any man will, and must fight, when necessary――even without a motive.’
He was himself concerned in many duels, as second, but only in two as
principal; one was with Mr. Hobhouse, before he became intimate with
him. Of his person he was particularly vain, and it was certainly of
superior order; he was about five feet eight and a half inches in
height, with a high forehead, adorned with fine, curling chesnut hair;
teeth, says an Italian authoress, which resemble pearls; hands as
beautiful as if they had been the works of art; eyes of the azure
color of the heavens; cheeks delicately tinged with the hue of the
pale rose; and withal, a countenance, in which the expression of an
extraordinary mind was fascinatingly conspicuous.
The religious sentiments of Lord Byron appear to have been much
misrepresented: ‘I am no bigot to infidelity,’ he says, in one of his
letters, ‘and did not expect that, because I doubted the immortality
of man, I should be charged with denying the existence of a God.’ Mr.
Moore having suspected that Mr. Shelley swayed his lordship’s
opinions, the latter writes, ‘pray, assure Mr. Moore that I have not
the smallest influence over lord Byron in this particular; if I had, I
certainly should employ it to eradicate from his great mind the
delusions of Christianity, which, in spite of his reason, seem
perpetually to recur, and to lay in ambush for the hours of sickness
and distress.’ It is doubtful, however, though he educated his natural
daughter in the Catholic faith, and he himself observed some of its
ceremonies, whether he was a believer in the tenets of Christianity.
He perceived and needed the consolation to be derived from a sincere
adoption of its creed, but his intellectual pride would not suffer him
to prostrate his reason at the humiliating shrine of faith.
The following anecdotes are interesting, and, upon the whole,
favorable illustrations of the paradoxical character of lord Byron:――A
young lady of talent being reduced to great hardships on account of
her family, came to the resolution of calling on lord Byron, at his
apartments in the Albany, for the purpose of soliciting his
subscription to a volume of poems. Having no knowledge of him, except
from his works, she entered his room with diffidence, but soon found
courage to state her request, which she did with simplicity and
delicacy. He listened with attention, and, when she had done speaking,
began to converse with her in so gentle and fascinating a manner, that
she hardly perceived he had been writing, until he put a slip of paper
into her hand, saying it was his subscription; ‘but,’ added he, ‘we
are both young, and the world is very censorious; and so, if I were to
take any active part in procuring subscribers to your poems, I fear it
would do you harm rather than good.’ The young lady, on looking at the
paper, found it a check for £50. During his residence at Venice, the
house of a shoemaker, who had a large family, being destroyed by fire,
lord Byron ordered a new habitation to be built at his own expense,
and presented the tradesman with a sum equal in value to the whole of
his loss. Whilst at Metaxata, in the island of Cephalonia, hearing of
several persons having been buried under an embankment which had
fallen in, he immediately hastened to the spot, accompanied by his
physician. After some of their companions had been extricated, the
laborers becoming alarmed for themselves, refused to dig further, when
he himself seized a spade, and, by his exertions, assisted by the
peasantry, succeeded in saving two more persons from certain death.
One of his household having subjected him to much perplexity by his
amorous propensities, he hit upon the following means for curing
them:――A young Suliote of the guard being dressed up like a woman, was
instructed to attract the notice of the gay Lothario, who, taking the
bait, was conducted by the supposed female to one of lord Byron’s
apartments, where he was almost terrified out of his senses by the
sudden appearance of an enraged husband, provided for the occasion.
The following anecdote shows how jealous he was of title:――an Italian
apothecary having sent him, one day, a packet of medicines addressed
to Monsieur Byron, he indignantly sent the physic back to learn better
manners. His coat of arms was, according to Leigh Hunt, suspended over
the foot of his bed; and even when a schoolboy at Dulwich, so little
disguised were his high notions of rank, that his companions used to
call him the Old English Baron. When residing at Mitylene, he
portioned eight young girls very liberally, and even danced with them
at their marriage feast; he gave a cow to one man, horses to another,
and silk to several girls who lived by weaving. He also bought a new
boat for a fisherman who had lost his own in a gale; and he often gave
Greek Testaments to the poor children. At Ravenna, he was so much
beloved by the poor people, that his influence over them was dreaded
by the government; and, indeed, wherever he resided, his generosity
and benevolence appear to have been eminently conspicuous.
Of the merits so universally acknowledged of lord Byron, as a poet,
little need be said; in originality of conception, depth and vigor of
thought, boldness of imagination, and power of expression, he is
unrivaled. His most sublime performances are Manfred, Childe Harold,
Heaven and Earth, and Cain; the first of these pieces has been highly
commended by Goëthe, who pronounces some parts of it superior to some
of the productions of Shakspeare. His great and favorable art lies in
his portraiture of the human character, thrown back upon itself by
satiety, conscious of its own wreck, yet disdaining penitence for the
vices it acknowledges, unable to find relief in itself, and scorning
to derive consolation from others. In this respect, he surpasses
Milton, who has only depicted the horrors of remorse; a far less
difficult task. Satan has an end in view, to which he is driven by
despair and hate: Manfred has none, yet, in the stern apathy of his
soul, he appears to us more terribly sublime even than Lucifer
himself. Don Juan is lord Byron’s most remarkable production; and
contains some of his finest and most common-place passages, and shows
a command of language and versatility of style that have never been
equaled. The tendency, however, of this and some other of his poems,
cannot be too explicitly condemned. In Don Juan, sensuality has one of
its most powerful and accomplished advocates; the sting by which it is
followed he calls the misfortune of nature, instead of the consequence
of vice; and, thus, instead of exalting our notions of virtue, makes
us regard the exercise of it as a melancholy and irksome duty.