"BYRON."
"P.S. If you think proper to send me any answer to this, I shall be
extremely happy to receive it. Adieu.
"P.S. 2d. As you say you are a novice in the art of knitting, I hope
it don't give you too much trouble. Go on _slowly_, but surely. Once
more, adieu."
We shall often have occasion to remark the fidelity to early habits
and tastes by which Lord Byron, though in other respects so versatile,
was distinguished. In the juvenile letter, just cited, there are two
characteristics of this kind which he preserved unaltered during the
remainder of his life;--namely, his punctuality in immediately
answering letters, and his love of the simplest ballad music. Among
the chief favourites to which this latter taste led him at this time
were the songs of the Duenna, which he had the good taste to delight
in; and some of his Harrow contemporaries still remember the
joyousness with which, when dining with his friends at the memorable
mother Barnard's, he used to roar out, "This bottle's the sun of our
table."
His visit to Southwell this summer was interrupted, about the
beginning of August, by one of those explosions of temper on the part
of Mrs. Byron, to which, from his earliest childhood, he had been but
too well accustomed, and in producing which his own rebel spirit was
not always, it may be supposed, entirely blameless. In all his
portraits of himself, so dark is the pencil which he employs, that the
following account of his own temper, from one of his journals, must be
taken with a due portion of that allowance for exaggeration, which his
style of self-portraiture, "overshadowing even the shade," requires.
"In all other respects," (he says, after mentioning his infant passion
for Mary Duff,) "I differed not at all from other children, being
neither tall nor short, dull nor witty, of my age, but rather
lively--except in my sullen moods, and then I was always a Devil.
They once (in one of my silent rages) wrenched a knife from me, which
I had snatched from table at Mrs. B.'s dinner (I always dined
earlier), and applied to my breast;--but this was three or four years
after, just before the late Lord B.'s decease.
"My _ostensible_ temper has certainly improved in later years; but I
shudder, and must, to my latest hour, regret the consequence of it and
my passions combined. One event--but no matter--there are others not
much better to think of also--and to them I give the preference....
"But I hate dwelling upon incidents. My temper is now under
management--rarely _loud_, and _when_ loud, never deadly. It is when
silent, and I feel my forehead and my cheek paling, that I cannot
control it; and then.... but unless there is a woman (and not any or
every woman) in the way, I have sunk into tolerable apathy."
Between a temper at all resembling this, and the loud hurricane bursts
of Mrs. Byron, the collision, it may be supposed, was not a little
formidable; and the age at which the young poet was now arrived;
when--as most parents feel--the impatience of youth begins to champ
the bit, would but render the occasions for such shocks more frequent.
It is told, as a curious proof of their opinion of each other's
violence, that, after parting one evening in a tempest of this kind,
they were known each to go privately that night to the apothecary's,
enquiring anxiously whether the other had been to purchase poison,
and cautioning the vender of drugs not to attend to such an
application, if made.
It was but rarely, however, that the young lord allowed himself to be
provoked into more than a passive share in these scenes. To the
boisterousness of his mother he would oppose a civil and, no doubt,
provoking silence,--bowing to her but the more profoundly the higher
her voice rose in the scale. In general, however, when he perceived
that a storm was at hand, in flight lay his only safe resource. To
this summary expedient he was driven at the period of which we are
speaking; but not till after a scene had taken place between him and
Mrs. Byron, in which the violence of her temper had proceeded to
lengths, that, however outrageous they may be deemed, were not, it
appears, unusual with her. The poet, Young, in describing a temper of
this sort, says--
"The cups and saucers, in a whirlwind sent,
Just intimate the lady's discontent."
But poker and tongs were, it seems, the missiles which Mrs. Byron
preferred, and which she, more than once, sent resounding after her
fugitive son. In the present instance, he was but just in time to
avoid a blow aimed at him with the former of these weapons, and to
make a hasty escape to the house of a friend in the neighbourhood;
where, concerting the best means of baffling pursuit, he decided upon
an instant flight to London. The letters, which I am about to give,
were written, immediately on his arrival in town, to some friends at
Southwell, from whose kind interference in his behalf, it may fairly
be concluded that the blame of the quarrel, whatever it may have been,
did not rest with him. The first is to Mr. Pigot, a young gentleman
about the same age as himself, who had just returned, for the
vacation, from Edinburgh, where he was, at that time, pursuing his
medical studies.