These are interesting landmarks to the visitor, who will find the path
to the tomb beneath the large elm well tracked, and the view there over
the far-stretching country such as well might draw the musing eyes of
the young poet. Captain Medwin says he saw the name of Byron "carved at
Harrow in three places, in very large characters--a presentiment of his
future fame, or a pledge of his ambition to acquire it." The play-ground
and cricket-ground will also be visited with equal interest. There we
see in these a new and eager generation of fine lads at play, and then
we have a lively idea of what Byron and his cotemporaries were at that
time, now less than forty years ago. No one was a more thorough
schoolboy, in all the enjoyment of play and youthful pranks, than Lord
Byron, as he himself, in verses addressed to one of his school comrades,
shows us, and as all his schoolfellows testify of him.
"Yet when confinement's lingering hour was done,
Our sports, our studies, and our souls were one:
Together we impelled the flying ball,
Together waited in our tutor's hall;
Together joined in cricket's manly toil,
Or shared the produce of the river's spoil;
Or plunging from the green declining shore,
Our pliant limbs the buoyant waters bore:
In every element, unchanged, the same,
All, all that brothers should be, but the name."
But the whole of this poem, called Childish Recollections, published in
the Hours of Idleness, is filled by the charms of recollected school
delights at Harrow. Here his schoolfellows, among others, were Lord
Clare, for whom, through life, he retained the warmest attachment, Lord
Delaware, the Duke of Dorset, to whom he addressed one of his early
poems, Colonel Wildman, who afterward purchased Newstead, Lord Jocelyn,
the Rev. William Harness, &c. He says, "P. Hunter, Curson, Long,
Tattersall, were my principal friends. Clare, Dorset, Colonel Gordon, De
Bath, Claridge, and John Wingfield, were my juniors and favorites."
Last, and not least, Sir Robert Peel was his cotemporary, and it is now
with very odd feelings that we read the anecdote in Byron's life, that
when a great fellow of a boy-tyrant, who claimed little Peel as a fag,
was giving him a castigation, Byron came and proposed to share it.
"While the stripes were succeeding each other, and poor Peel writhing
under them, Byron saw and felt for the misery of his friend; and
although he knew that he was not strong enough to fight ****** with any
hope of success, and that it was dangerous even to approach him, he
advanced to the scene of action, and with a blush of rage, tears in his
eyes, and a voice trembling between terror and indignation, asked very
humbly if ****** would be pleased to tell him 'how many stripes he meant
to inflict.' 'Why,' returned the executioner, 'you little rascal, what
is that to you?' 'Because, if you please,' said Byron, holding out his
arm, 'I would take half.'"
With Harrow, we take leave of the years of innocent boyhood. His removal
to Cambridge, and his now long residences in London, led him into those
dissipations and sensualities which continued to cast a sad foil on the
greater part of his after life. To Cambridge he never appeared much
attached, and rather _resided_ there occasionally as a necessity for
taking his degree than from any pleasure he had in the place. His rooms
in Trinity College, Cambridge, are nearly the sole locality which will
there attract the attention of the admirers of the poet, except the
Commoners' hall, in which now the long tossed about statue of him by
Thorwaldsen is about to be erected.
It was during his being a student of Cambridge that Newstead Abbey fell
into his hands by the expiration of Lord Grey de Ruthyn's lease, and
that he went thither, and repaired it to a certain extent, and furnished
it at an expense far beyond his resources at the time. Here, with half a
dozen of his fellow-collegians, among whom was the very clever and
early-lost Charles Skinner Matthews, he spent a rackety time. He had got
a set of monks' dresses from a masquerade warehouse in London, and in
these they used to sit up all night, drinking and full of uproarious
merriment. "Our hour of rising," says Mr. Matthews himself, "was one. It
was frequently past two before the breakfast party broke up. Then, for
the amusements of the morning, there was reading, fencing, single-stick,
or shuttle-cock, in the great room; practicing with pistols in the hall;
walking, riding, cricket, sailing on the lake, playing with the bear, or
teasing the wolf. Between seven and eight we dined; and our evening
lasted from that time till one, two, or three in the morning. The
evening's diversions may easily be conceived. I must not omit the custom
of handing round, after dinner, on the removal of the cloth, a human
skull filled with Burgundy. After reveling on choice viands and the
finest wines of France, we adjourned to tea, where we amused ourselves
with reading or improving conversation, each according to his fancy; and
after sandwiches, &c., retired to rest."
It may well be imagined what a scandal this occasioned in the
neighborhood. During this time there were still work-people employed in
the repairs of the house; and I recollect a master-plasterer, who, at
the same time, was doing work for my father a dozen miles off, relating,
to our astonishment, the goings on of these gay roisterers. Byron
himself says, that
"Where Superstition once had made her den,
Now Paphian girls were known to sing and smile."
And the person here referred to particularly mentioned one young damsel,
dressed in boy's clothes, that Byron had there, no doubt the same who
about the same time lived with him at Brompton, and used to ride about
on horseback with him at Brighton. Here, at this time, his dog Boatswain
died, and had the well-known tomb raised for him in the garden where the
poet himself proposed to lie. Here he employed himself with writing his
scarifying English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, which appeared about the
time that he came of age, and so amply avenged him of the Edinburgh
reviewers. Being, as he informs us, about ten thousand pounds in debt,
he left his mother in possession of Newstead, and set out on his foreign
tour. In two years he returned to England, not only triumphant, by the
great popularity of his satire, over all his enemies, but having in his
portfolio the first two cantos of his inimitable Childe Harold. From
this moment he was the most celebrated man of his age, and that at the
age of twenty-four. At one spring he ascended above Sir Walter Scott
with all his well-earned honors. From the most solitary and friendless,
because unconnected, man of his rank, living about town in clubs and
lodgings, for his few college friends were scattered abroad in the
world, he became at once the great lion of all circles. Lord Holland,
Rogers, Moore, &c., were his friends. He was besieged on all sides by
aristocratic blue-stockings and givers of great parties. His life was,
for four or five years, that of the most perfect Circean intoxication of
worship and dissipation; yet during this period he poured out the
Giaour, the Bride of Abydos, the Corsair and Lara, poems of great vigor
and beauty, and new in scene and spirit, but by no means reaching that
height of poetical wealth and glory which he afterward mounted to. Then
came his ill-starred marriage, and in one short year his utter and
lasting separation from his wife. This unfortunate marriage, against
which he was strenuously warned by his most experienced friends, became
the blight of his whole life. To the last he persisted in protesting
that he never knew the cause of his wife's withdrawal from him; but Lady
Byron, in a paper addressed to his biographer since his decease, has
assigned as the reason that she believed him insane, or, if not insane,
not safe to live with. No wonder that his excitable temperament was
lashed to a pitch of phrensy little short of madness, when such were his
pecuniary embarrassments that, in the one year of his living with his
wife, nine executions were levied on his goods, his rank only saving
him from a prison. It is easy to perceive the effect of this on the
proud and sensitive mind of Lord Byron; and when the hand that should
have soothed him was coolly withdrawn from him on the occasion, the
finish was put to mortal endurance. Banished, as it were, by the
abhorrence of his country--of that country which, from worshiping him,
turned as suddenly to denounce him--believing that in the abandonment by
a wife there must be some hideous cause, he went forth never to return.
The limits of this work will necessarily confine any minute account of
the homes and haunts of our poets to those only which lie within the
British isles; I shall, therefore, only summarily trace the progress of
Byron's wanderings and abodes from this period; and before doing this, I
will point out in a few lines the residences which he occupied during
the five years of his London life. Before he went abroad, Gordon's
Hotel, Durant's Hotel, both in Albemarle-street, and 8 St.
James's-street, were his homes. On his return from his first tour, he
took on a lease for seven years a suite of rooms in the Albany, of Lord
Althorpe. The year of his married life was chiefly spent at 13
Piccadilly Terrace. The clubs which he frequented were the Alfred, the
Cocoa Tree, Watier's, and the Union.
In his first tour he traversed Portugal, Spain, Greece, and Turkey,
tracking his way in light by the composition of Childe Harold. Now,
abandoned by the one heart that he had chosen to be his domestic stay
and solace through life, assailed bitterly by that public which had so
recently devoured with avidity his splendid poems, regarded as an
infidel and a desperado, he went from the field of Waterloo across
Belgium, along the Rhine, through Switzerland into Italy, which became
his second country, retaining him till a few months before his death.
Every step of his progress was illustrated by triumphs of genius still
more brilliant than before. From the moment that at Waterloo he
exclaimed
"Stop, for thy tread is on an empire's dust,"
till that in which he concludes with his sublime apostrophe to the
Ocean, he advances from Alp to Alp in the regions of genius. Every one
that traces the banks of the Rhine is made to feel what additional
charms he has scattered along them; and how infinitely inferior are all,
even the most enthusiastic and elaborate descriptions of its scenery
from other pens.
"The castled crag of Drachenfels
Frowns o'er the wild and winding Rhine,
Whose breast of waters broadly swells
Beneath the banks which bear the vine,
And hills all rich with blossomed trees,
And fields which promise corn and wine,
And scattered cities crowning these,
Whose fair white walls along them shine.
"And peasant girls, with deep blue eyes,
And hands which offer early flowers,
Walk smiling o'er this paradise;
Above, the frequent feudal towers
Through green leaves lift their walls of gray,
And many a rock which steeply lowers,
And noble arch in proud decay,
Look o'er this vale of vintage bowers."
Volumes of description could not give you so vivid a feeling of the
characteristic features of the Valley of the Rhine as these lines. And
thus through the Alps, "The palaces of Nature," Byron advanced into
Italy, the land of ancient art, heroic deeds, and elysian nature. At
Geneva he fell in with Shelley for the first time, and henceforth these
two great poets became friends. At Diodati, on the Lake of Geneva, he
spent the autumn, then advanced to Italy, and took up his abode in
Venice, where, in the Palace Mocenigo, on the Canal Grande, he lived
till December, 1819, _i. e._, about three years. His next remove was to
Ravenna, where he had splendid apartments in the Guiccioli Palace. In
the autumn of 1821 he quitted Ravenna, having resided there not two
years, and took up his residence in the Lanfranchi Palace on the Arno,
which he describes as large enough for a garrison. In the autumn of 1822
he quitted Pisa for Genoa, having resided at Pisa a year. At Genoa he
inhabited the Villa Saluzzo at Albaro, one of the suburbs of that city,
where he continued to live till the July of 1823, not quite a year, when
he set sail for Greece, where in a few months his existence terminated.
Of Lord Byron's abodes and modes of life we have some graphic glimpses
in Moore's life, in Shelley's and Captain Medwin's notices. Every where
he remained true to his schoolboy habits of riding on horseback,
swimming, firing with pistols; to his love of bull and Newfoundland
dogs. Moore describes his house in Venice as a damp-looking mansion, on
a dismal canal. "As we groped our way after him," he says, "through the
dark hall, he cried out, 'Keep clear of the dog;' and before we had
proceeded many paces further, 'Take care, or that monkey will fly at
you:' a curious proof of his fidelity to all the tastes of his youth,
out of the sort of menagerie which visitors at Newstead had to encounter
in their progress through his hall." Soon after he adds, "The door burst
open, and at once we entered an apartment not only spacious and elegant,
but wearing an aspect of comfort and habitableness which, to a
traveler's eye, is as welcome as rare." Captain Medwin somewhere
mentions meeting Lord Byron, traveling from one of his places of abode
to another, with a train of carriages, monkeys, and whiskered servants,
a strange procession; and Shelley, visiting him at Ravenna, says, "Lord
Byron has here splendid apartments in the palace of his mistress's
husband, who is one of the richest men in Italy. There are two monkeys,
five cats, eight dogs, and ten horses, all of whom, except the horses,
walk about the house like the masters of it. Tita, the Venetian, is
here, and operates as my valet--a fine fellow, with a prodigious black
beard, who has stabbed two or three people, and is the most good-natured
fellow I ever saw."
Of his house at Pisa, Byron himself says: "I have got here a famous old
feudal palazzo, on the Arno, large enough for a garrison, with dungeons
below and cells in the walls; and so full of _ghosts_, that the learned
Fletcher, my valet, has begged leave to change his room, and then
refused to occupy his _new_ room because there were more ghosts there
than in the other. It is quite true that there are most extraordinary
noises, as in all old buildings, which have terrified the servants so as
to incommode me extremely. There is one place where people were
evidently _walled up_; for there is but one possible passage, broken
through the wall, and then meant to be closed again upon the inmate. The
house once belonged to the Lanfranchi family, the same mentioned by
Ugolina in his dream, as his persecutor with Sismondi, and has had a
fierce owner or two in its time."
The mode of spending his time appears by all accounts to have been
pretty much the same every where. Rising about one o'clock at noon,
taking a hasty breakfast, often standing. "At three or four," says the
Guiccioli, "at Ravenna and Pisa, those who used to ride out with him
agreed to call, and after a game at billiards they mounted and rode
out." At the two latter places his resort was generally the forests
adjoining the towns. At Ravenna, that forest rendered so famous by Dante
and Boccaccio, especially for the story of the specter huntsman in the
Decamerone; and at Pisa the old pine forest stretching down to the sea.
Latterly he used to proceed to the outside of the city, to avoid the
staring of the people, especially English people, then mounted his
horse, and rode on at a great rate. In the forest they used to fire with
pistols at a mark. The forest rides of Byron near Pisa and Ravenna will
always be scenes visited with deep interest by Englishmen, and Shelley's
description of themselves, the two great poets, in Julian and Maddalo,
as they rode
"Upon the bank of land which breaks the flow
Of Adria toward Venice, a bare strand
Of hillocks, heaped from ever-shifting sand,
Matted with thistles and amphibious weeds,"
is one of everlasting value. Returning to dinner at six or seven, he
conversed with his friends till midnight, and then sat down to write.
Thus we have traced this great and singular man from the mountains of
the Scottish Highlands, where he roamed as a boy, from land to land,
till he stood as a liberator on the shores of Greece, and was seen for a
few months riding forth with his long train of Suliote guards, and then
was at once lost to Greece and the world. In no short life was there
ever more to applaud and to condemn, to wonder at and to deplore. From
those hereditary and other causes which we have already noticed, the
temperament of Byron was passionate to the excess; but this extreme
sensibility, which was the food and foundation of his splendid genius,
was at the same time the torture of his existence. Misunderstood where
he ought to have been soothed with the deepest tenderness, attacked by
the public where he should have been most closely sympathized with, he
went forth, as it were, reckless of peace or of character. A series of
adulterous connections darkened his glorious reputation, and served to
justify in the eyes of the public the accusations of those who had
goaded him to these very excesses. But spite of the censures of the
world, and reproaches of his own conscience, the powers of his genius
continually grew till they even forced into the silence of astonishment
the most heartless of his detractors. To say nothing of those grand and
somber metaphysical dramas, Manfred, Cain, and the rest which he wrote
in Italy, the poem alone of Childe Harold, ever ascending in magnificent
strength, richness, and beauty, as it advanced, was sufficient to give
him an immortality second to no other. The wide and superb field of its
action--that of all the finest countries of Europe; the great
events--those of the most stirring and momentous age of the whole world;
and the illustrious names which it wove into its living mass; the
glorious remains of art, and the still more glorious features of nature
in Italy and Greece, all combined to render Childe Harold the great poem
of his own, and the favorite of every after age. Totally different as he
was under different impressions, Childe Harold had the transcendent
advantage of being the product of that mood which was inspired only by
the contemplation of every object calculated to draw him away from the
seductions of society, and the lower tones of his mind; the mood
inspired by the most august objects of heaven and of earth--the midnight
skies, the Alpine mountains, the sublimities of mighty rivers and
oceans, the basking beauties of southern nature, and the crumbling but
unrivaled works of man. Filled with all these images of nobility and
greatness, he gave them back to his page with a tone so philosophically
profound, with a music so thrilling, with a dignity so graceful and yet
so tender, that nothing in poetry can be conceived more fascinating and
perfect. Every thought is so clearly and fully developed, every image is
so substantial and so strongly defined, and the very skepticism which
here and there betrays itself comes forth so accompanied by a pensive,
earnest, and intense longing after life, that it resembles the
melancholy tone which pervades the book of Job, and some of the
prophets, more than that of any other human, much less modern
composition. We may safely assert that there are a hundred combining
causes, in the subjects and the spirit of Childe Harold, to render it to
every future age the most lovely and endearing gift from this. Don Juan,
the reflex of Byron's ordinary, as this was of his solitary and higher
life--his life alone with Nature and with God--has its wonderful and
inimitable passages; but Childe Harold is one woven mass of beauty and
intellectual gold from end to end.
In judging the errors of Lord Byron, there is one consideration
calculated to disarm severity perhaps more than all others. The excesses
in which he had indulged were made by Providence the means of the
severest punishment that could befall him. The cause of Greece aroused
his spirit, at that period of life when life should have been in its
prime, and a new scene of most glorious ambition was spread to him, that
of adding to the unrivaled renown of the poet the still more grateful
renown of becoming the savior of a country and a people, whom the
triumphs of ancient art, science, liberty, and literature had made, as
it were, kindred to the whole world. This august prospect was unveiled
to him, and he rushed forward to secure it; but his constitution, sapped
by vicious indulgence, gave way; the brilliant promise of new and
loftiest glories was snatched from him; he sunk and perished. Reflecting
on this, the hardest moralist could not desire a sadder retribution; and
they who love rather to seek in the corrupt mass of humanity for the
original germs of the divine nature, will turn with Mr. Moore to the
fair side, and acquiesce most cordially in the concluding words of his
biography. "It would not be in the power, indeed, of the most poetical
friend to allege any thing more convincingly favorable of his character
than is contained in the few simple facts, that, through life, with all
his faults, he never lost a friend; that those about him in his youth,
whether as companions, teachers, or servants, remained attached to him
to the last; that the woman to whom he gave the love of his maturer
years idolizes his name; and that, with a single unhappy exception,
scarce an instance is to be found of any one once brought, however
briefly, into relations of amity with him, that did not feel toward him
a kind regard in life, and retain a fondness for his memory."