sake of those noble persons themselves; than whom, as a race, no race on earth requires more to be reminded, that men without title are not dust under their feet; and that the wearer of a coronet may deserve the lash and may meet it, from a man with not a drop of Norman blood in his veins.

The warlike correspondence ended in an armistice, cemented at a dinner given by that "ancient and loving grandmother, as Massinger would have it, of the muses," Rogers; but of which Byron would partake nothing but "potatoes and vinegar," a mixture which that wicked wit, Lady Caroline Lambe, pronounced to be "in compliment to the country of his antagonist, and the qualities of his host." Byron's opinions about the poets of the day were easy enough. "Do read mathematics. I should think X plus Y, at least as amusing as the Curse of Kehama, and much more intelligible. Master Southey's poems are, in fact, what parallel lines might be, viz., prolonged ad infinitum with out meeting anything half so absurd as themselves."

His summer visits to the country seats gave him some insight into public persons.

At Lord Jersey's"Erskine was there, good but intolerable. He jested, he talked, he did everything, admirably. But then, he would be applauded for the same thing twice over he would read his own verses, his own paragraphs, and tell his own story again and again; and then the Trial by Jury' I almost wished it abolished, for I sate next him at dinner."

Drury-lane having been burnt, for the ruin of Sheridan's creditors, and rebuilt for the ruin of a fresh set, the committee, with Lord Holland at their head, perpetrated the long-laughed-at scheme of summoning all the verse makers of England or Europe to write an opening address. Some thousands poured in upon them, all equally good or evil. Until the committee convinced, at last, that to choose was impossible, and to recite them all at

once not very easy, came to the natural expedient of having one address, written by one person, and recited by one other. The task was comfortless enough, and Lord Byron made it a curiously anxious one; for we have no less than a dozen letters written to his unfortunate inspirer, Lord Holland, in the course of a month; and every one of them containing cuttings out, cuttings up, and corrections, that must have singularly perplexed his lordship. It is not easy to reconcile this industry with his letter to Mr. Murray.

His

"I was applied to to write the address for Drury-lane; but the moment I heard of the contest, I gave up the idea of contending against all Grubstreet. To triumph would have been no glory, and to have been defeated'sdeath! I would have choked myself, like Otway, with a quartern loaf. So, remember, I had, and have nothing to do with it, upon my honor !" poem, after all, was good for nothing; but it was good enough for the purpose. It produced, however, two good consequences, the "Rejected Addresses,' on the fame of which "the authors of the Rejected Addresses" still put forth their performances; and the display of Dr. Busby's person haranguing from the boxes, his son's person haranguing from the stage; a display of the Bow-street officers interfering with the eloquence of both; and a week's ridicule of all the parties concerned. The Dr.'s poem, beginning with

to me.

This report, I suppose, you will take care to contradict, as the author, I am sure, will not like that I should wear his cap and bells." This, in a letter to the publisher himself, is rather amusing.

He and Sheridan sometimes met; the young lord having a great and justified admiration for the abilities of the old dramatist." Sheridan was a rogue all his life long, but a delightful rogue."

"One day I saw him take up his 'Monody on Garrick.' He lighted on the dedication to the dowager Lady On seeing it he flew into a rage, and exclaimed, that it must be a forgery-that he had never dedicated anything of his to such a d-d canting, &c. &c., and so went on for half an hour, abusing his own dedication."

"He told me, that on the night of the grand success of his School for Scandal,' he was knocked down, and put into the watch-house, for making a row in the street, and being found intoxicated by the watchmen."

"When dying, he was requested to undergo an operation. He replied, that he had already submitted to two, which were enough for one man's lifetime ;—having his hair cut, and sitting for his picture!"

The biographer now comes to the Leigh Hunt acquaintance, which he gets over in a tone of easy contempt.

"It was at this time that Lord Byron became acquainted (and I regret to have to add, partly through my means) with Mr. Leigh Hunt." They went together to dine with Hunt in the Coldbath-fields prison, where he was confined for a libel on the Prince Regent, in 1813. The morning was ushered in by an epistle from his Lordship to Moore, beginning with

"Oh you, who in all names can tickle the

town,

Anacreon, Tom Little, Tom Moore, or Tom

Brown ;

For hang me, if I know of which you may most brag,

Your quarto of Two pounds, or Twopenny Post-bag."

Byron at length turned his thoughts to looking out for a wife; and Lady Melbourne recommended Miss Milbanke, to whom he accordingly made proposals. The offer was rejected; but the lady adopted the extraordinary measure of requesting his correspondence. So much for the delicacy of the blues. At the end of two years of this foolish and trifling sentimentality, he was informed that he might make his proposals again. What an odd situation is ours," says Byron, "not a spark of love on either side." The mode of making this overture must be a pleasant discovery for the lady. His "memoranda say, that a friend advised him to take a wife, and mentioned one. Byron mentioned Miss Milbanke.

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66

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The friend objected to her want of immediate fortune, and her "learning." Byron allowed the argument, proposed for the friend's choice, and was refused. On reading the refusal he tried Miss Milbanke again, writing a letter to her at the moment of his receiving the rejection. friend still argued, but taking up the letter, said, "It is really a very pretty letter. It is a pity it should not go. I never read a prettier one. "" Then it shall go," said Byron. It went at the instant, and as Moore rather legally says, was "the fiat of his fate." Byron declared that he had not seen her for ten months before!

What wonder that this kind of marriage should have run into bickerings and separation. The biographer throws no further light on the "mysterious. separation," of which all the world talked so much at the time. But the courtship was a sufficient solution. The wife had taken her steps in palpable defiance of her parents and friends, and of course had nobody to thank for her subsequent ill-luck but herself. Byron brought her into a house which

had nine executions in it in the course of one year,-was a roué, and clearly a troublesome companion for a fireside.

But all this the lady knew before; for the gentleman had never made any concealment of his tastes;

that the fault "was in the choice." And as Miss Milbanke married, in the spirit of blueism, a man who was proud of publishing his scorn of mankind and womankind, and home and country, and the habits and principles of English life, she ought to have made up her mind to go through with the affair. Byron was no more to blame than every rake, and he was probably not more a rake than ninety-nine out of the hundred of his rank, except in his ostentation of offence to society. His wife took him "with all faults," and her separation from him certainly threw the weight of blame on her side. Byron's nature was arrogant and sullen, but he had intervals of gentleness and feeling. Time, and kindness at home, might have softened him, and he might have gradually taken the place in society, due to men of abilities, who have at length discovered that there is a more enduring fame, and a wiser occupation of life, than the cackle of coteries, or the alternate riot and dejection of the tavern.

The volume on the whole is amusing. Moore should be a man of tactfrom his mixture with the race who are always talking about it; yet we miss this considerably in his determination to insert everything that dropped from Byron's pen. The frequent panegyric of himself in the letters must have been a painful pressure on the biographer's feelings, to which we think his love of fidelity might have given way without a crime. Byron's own details of his reprobate amours, the morals of his friends, and his religious notions in general, (which are nonsense, much less remarkable for their novelty than their ostentatious emptiness, folly, and ignorance,) ought to have been wholly omitted.

partiality, the biographer may claim universal praise. He lets out the facts, be they what they will, and run a muck at whom they may. The following anecdote from one of Byron's many journals, is, we suppose, historic.

"Murray, the bookseller! has been cruelly cudgeled of misbegotten knaves in Kendal-green,' at Newington Butts, in his way home from a purlieu dinner, and robbed-would you believe it?-of three or four bonds of forty pounds a-piece, and a seal ring of his grandfather's, worth a million. This is his version; but others opine that D'Israeli, with whom he dined, knocked him down with his last publication, the Quarrels of Authors, in a dispute about copyright. Be that as it may, the newspapers have teemed with his injuria formæ, and he has been embrocated and invisible to all but his apothecary ever since."

Of Byron's poetic powers there can be no doubt; and as little of his possessing some qualities which circumstances might have softened and improved into social good. But he was, in the strongest sense of the word, unlucky. He had but two friends, Hobhouse and Moore, both gentlemen, and fitted to have led him away from the hollow and hazardous pursuits which bad company and bad habits had made second nature. But the Shelleys and the Matthewses, and the Guicciolis, had higher captivations for him; and he flung away himself, his fortune, and his fame; a memorable example of great powers rendered a source of misery to the possessor; and of the highest advantages of society consigning him, by a direct and almost fated progress, to the life of an exile, to an empty struggle for empty objects, and to a foreign grave, among the obscure haunts of banditti and

Two brothers, Paul and John, were among my nearest neighbors. Paul was the beadle of the parish church, and his figure, which resembled that of a baboon nearly as much as that of a man, was arrayed on Sundays in a coat of blue, faced with scarlet; and his head was honored with a cocked hat, with broad gold lace. On other days, Paul laid aside his dignity, and appeared in plain clothes, a good deal the worse for wear.

One of his ordinary employments was going round to the farm-houses to gather eggs; for Paul hated labor, and loved ale and at every farm-house he got a cup of his favorite beverage, in consideration of his sparing the farmer's wife the trouble of sending her eggs to market. His basket filled, Paul changed his route, and went to those houses where no poultry was kept; and here he got a cup of ale in consideration of sparing the mistress the trouble of sending to market to buy eggs. Of all Paul's customers, I was the favorite, and the first served: and right it was that I should be so; for our consumption of eggs was the greatest, our ale was the strongest, and I made him a regular and liberal allowance of profit in money, which procured him ale at the public house in the village.

Paul had a wife, an excellent, kindhearted woman, who, after having passed a long life in his service, left him a widower, when she was ninetythree years of age. I never heard that Paul discovered any symptoms of uneasiness on this occasion; for he was one of those persons, of whom there are many, who care only for them

selves; and he had a daughter, as good and as kind as her mother, and about thirty years younger, who left him nothing to wish for that attention could bestow.

But a heavier misfortune awaited Paul. The cottage, in which he had passed the whole of his life, became, like himself, in a crazy condition, and he was obliged to quit it, lest it should fall upon his head. He and his daughter removed to a tenement at a hundred yards distance, and it was well they did so; for soon after, and after a windy night, I walked through the lane in which it had stood, and found that the thatch had vanished, the plaster walls were scattered on the adjoining field, and only a few bare beams were remaining in their place.

Paul was now become very infirm, and gathered eggs no more; but his attachment to his office, and his fine clothes, was unabated. He crept to church every Sunday, though it was a mile and a half distant from his dwelling; and he crawled on his hands and knees over a long bridge, two planks in breadth, which lay in his way, because he dared not trust himself to walk over it. From this state, the gradation was regular and certain. Paul was confined to his house, his chair, his bed, was laid in the churchyard, in which he had so often assisted to lay his fellow parishioners, and his coat and hat were worn by another. This happened when he had attained the age of his late wife, that is, ninety-three years.

John, the younger brother of Paul, was a hard-working, saving, sober man, rented a field, kept a cow, and

had money in the bank. His wife died young: I believe at little more than sixty years of age; his daughter was married; his sons were away; and his only inmate was what my neighbors term a housekeeper, that is, a woman of all work. John had been a traveller, and delighted to boast of it. "When I was young," he used to say, "I was once sent, with a pauper and a pass-cart to Burton-upon-Trent (twenty-eight miles), and, gom! I dayn't think the world had been half so big as it is!"

Every half-year John walked to his banker's in the neighboring town, with his six months' savings in his pocket, to be added to his fund. His errand was known to us all by his drab-colored Sunday coat, of twenty years' duration. At length, John bent under the weight of years, as he had long done under the weight of labor, and he had great difficulty in getting to his banker. Go he must, however, for no one else could be trusted. I saw him walking homewards with a slow step; the next time, I saw his servant go to meet him, and he returned leaning on her arm. I saw him no more; and, a short time afterwards, he was laid by his brother; not, however, till he had passed the age of his brother, for he was ninety-four.

nor

My next neighbors were two brothers and a sister, all single, and living together, with a man and woman servant as their domestics. The two brothers had neither business amusement, nor did they want either. On Sundays they went to church and read the Bible; on other days they read the newspaper, or chatted with a neighbor on neighborly concerns; if it were day, the little wicker gate of the court was between the parties; if evening, the neighbor was admitted to the fireside; but no one ever presumed to take the elbow chair, in the chimney corner, which was the privileged seat of the elder brother. My neighbors kept a sumptuous table, and their woman servant was an excellent cook. No harsh word was ever heard in their house; the brothers and sister loved

each other; the servants did as they pleased, without being reprimanded; the masters and mistress treated them with kindness, and behaved to them with familiarity. No beggar ever went from the door empty handed; it being the maxim of these worthy people, that it was better to bestow their money on twenty impostors, than to turn away one who needed relief.

So smoothly did the current of life glide on with my three neighbors, till, in a luckless hour, a widower neighbor of sixty-five took it into his head to woo the sister, who was about the same age. He was known to be a selfish and unfeeling man, and to have been a churlish husband to his former wife. The brothers were alarmed for the happiness of their sister, and gently endeavored to persuade her to dismiss her suitor: but she was convinced that she had been long enough unmarried, and certain that he would treat her better than he had done her predecessor. On these convictions she married him; and she, who had never received, or merited, contradiction, was thwarted in every action of her future life, and died, broken down with sorrow and vexation, at the premature age of eighty-eight.

The brothers kept "the even tenor of their way," and reached the customary standard of existence in the neighborhood; the elder dying first, as it was but right he should do, at the age of ninety-four; and the younger, after having leaned on his wicker gate a little longer, conversing with his neighbors, dying at the age of ninetythree, The man servant, who had passed fifty years in the service of the brothers, and the woman, who had passed more than thirty, were rendered independent by the will of their last master.

I might here notice another neighbor who died lately at the age of ninety-one; but he was worthless, and I will say no more about him.

One family only remains to be noticed, and one field only intervenes between their garden and mine. Though all the persons I have men