The Poetical Works of Lord Byron, etc

Front matter

THE POETICAL WORKS OF LORD BYRON. Illustrate eBJJition, s ■?■) © i , (3 \/' i ) ■ r \ : i\r' - • THE POETICAL WORKS OF LORD BYRON ILLUSTRATED EDITION LONDON VIRTUE & CO., CITY ROAD AND IVY LANE CONTENTS. PAOE I.ifE i The Giaour 1 The Bride of Abydos. Canto 1 14 Canto II 18 This Corsair. Canto 1 26 Canto II 31 Canto III 36 Laba. Canto 1 43 Canto II 48 Siege op Corinth 54 Parisina 63 Fare thee well 68 Prisoner of Chillon. A Fable ... 69 Sonnet on Chillon . .... ib A Sketch 73 Manfred. A Dramatic Poem ... 74 Cain. A Mystery 87 Hours of Idleness. Preface . . . .105 Epitaph on a Friend 106 A Fragment 107 On leaving Newstead Abbey . . . ib. Adrian's Address to his Soul when dying . ib. Translation from Catullus . . . ib. Translation of the Epitaph on Virgil and Tibullus ib. Translation from Catullus . . . ib.

Imitated from Catullus. To Ellen . . 108 From Anacreon ib. From the Prometheus Vinctus of Æschylus ib. Stanzas to a Lady, with the Poems of Camoens 109 The First Kiss of Love .... ib. To the Duke of Dorset . ... ib. Granta. A Medley . . . . 110 On a Distant View of the Village and School of Harrow-on-the-Hill . .111 ToM 112 To Woman ib. To M. S. G. . . . . . . ib. To Mary, on receiving her Picture . . ib. Love's Last Adieu 113 Damætas ib. To Marion »'*. Oscar of Alva 114 The Episode of Nisus and Euryalus . .116 Translation from the Medea of Euripides . 120 Thoughts suggested by a College Examination ib. To a beautiful Quaker . . . .121 An Occasional Prologue . ib. On the Death of Mr. Fox . . . .122 The Tear •*. Lachin y Gair ib. To Romance 123 Answer to some elegant Verses sent bv a Friend 124 Elegy on Newstead Abbey ib.

Childish Recollections . . . .126 On the Death of Calmar and Orla . . 129 To Edward Noel Long, Esq. . . .130 ToaLady . . . . . . .131 I would 1 were a careless Child . . ib. When I roved a young Highlander . .132 PAOB Hours of Idleness {continued) — To George, Earl Delawarr ... 132 To the Earl of Clare 133 I ,ines written beneath an Elm in the Churchyard of Harrow . . . .134 Article from the " Edinburgh Review " for January, 1808 ib. On the Death of a Young Lady . . 345 To E ib. To D ib. Lines ....... ib. Imitation of Tibullus .... ib. Translation from Horace .... 346 To Emma ib. To M. 8. G ib. To Caroline ...... ib. To Caroline 347 To Caroline ib. On a change of Masters at a great Public School ib. Fragment 348 To Lesbia ib. Lines addressed to a Young Lady . . ib. To a Lady ib. The Cornelian 319 Reply to some Verses .... ib.

Chapter I

rERfENT BOYHOOD ANCESTRAL AND PARENTAL INFLUENCES SCHOOL DATS AND TRAINING — FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF NATURE CHILDISH ATTACHMENTS — HARROW — MENTAL DEVELOPMENT — DISAPPOINT- MENT IN LOVE. The author of Childe Harold could trace his descent from the adventurous knights who accom panied William the Norman to the shores of England, and were rewarded for their devotion to his cause with the broad lands of the conquered race. Ralph de Burun stands high in the Doomsday-book, among the tenants of land in Nottinghamshire. Some ruins might lately be traced of Horeston Castle, the chief seat of his successors ; and the extensive possessions of the family were increased, in the reign of Edward I., by the additional grant of the manor of Rochdale in Lancashire. The poet might boast too with pride, that his ancestors were distinguished no less for loyalty and valour, than for their ample inheritance.

In his juvenile poems, he alludes to the Henry VIII. the grant of the lands and priory oi Newstead, which thenceforth became the family seat. It was his great grandson who in 1643 was created Baron Byron of Rochdale. The newly-created Lord and all his brothers were devoted to the cause of the unfortunate Charles, and no less than seven of them fought on his side, at the battle of Edge-hill, and on other occasions. " On Marston, with Rupert, 'gainst traitors contending, Four brothers enrich'd with their blood the bleak Held : For the rights of a monarch, their country defending, 'TUl death their attachment to royalty seal'd." On the maternal side Lord Byron's ancestry was no less illustrious, his mother being an heiress of the old Highland lineage of Gight aud Gordon, collaterally related to the royal house of Scotland.

" Mail-cove»ed barons, who proudly to battle Led their vassals from Europe to Palestine's plains." " Many of my maternal ancestors," he informs us, " fought for the unfortunate Prince Charles, better known by the name of the Pretender. This branch was really allied by blood, as well as by attachment, to the Stuarts. George II., Earl of Huntley, married the Princess Anabella Stuart, daughter of James I. of Scotland ; by her he had live sons. The third, Sir William Gordon, I have the honour to claim as one of my progenitors." There are certain old carved groups of figures in one of the chambers at Newstead Abbey: one representing a turbaned infidel, with a Christian knight on one side, and a female on the other. In another the female is in the centre, and on each side is the head of a Saracen with his eyes fixed upon her; but whether these are memorials of some adventures of his supposed crusading ancestors, allegorical devices, or grotesque fancies of the carvers, there is nothing to decide.

The chivalry of the Byrons was signalized in the wars of Edward III. with France : But at the period of the noble poet's birth a change had come over the fame and fortunes of this time honoured family, owing in great measure to the fierce, eccentric character of his great uncle, and to the open and unblushing profligacy of his father. The former had stood his trial before the House of Peers, for killing, in a quarrel, his relative and neigh bour, Mr. Chaworth of Annesley ; and, on his acquittal, had buried himself in the seclusion of Newstead, where, abandoned by his neighbours, his character acquired a still darker tinge cf moroseness and terocily, "Paul, and Hubert too, sleep in the valley of Cressy For the safety of Edward and England they fell." It was still more conspicuously displayed in our own civil struggles, from which period is dated the nobility of the house.

A distinguished member of the family, Sir John Byron the Little, had fought by the side of the Earl of Richmond at Bosworth-field, and at the dissolution ofthe monasteries had received from b THE LTPE CE LORD BYRON. II Byron soon swallowed up the greater part of his wife's property, the estate of Gight was sold, and but a pittance of 150/. a-year reserved from the wreck of her property for her personal maintenance. It was under these wretched circumstances that Mrs. Byron, on her return from France, gave birth, on the 22d of January, 1788, in Holies Street, London, to her first and only child, George Gordon Byron. Soon after she proceeded with her infant to Aberdeen, where she was joined by her husband. He had long thrown off even the decen cies of their relative position, and gave way without restraint to his feelings of dis just and aversion to the miserable woman he had so cruelly injured.

Extreme in all her feelings, and naturally violent in temper, the harshness of such treatment seems almost to have overthrown her reason, and to have fearfully increased, even if it did not originate, those half insane fits of alternate tenderness and violence, which afterwards became habitual, and which exercised so mischievous an influence upon the mind and character of her son. Mr. Byron's sole object in enduring the proximit y of his wife (for evenwhen at Aberdeen they occupied lodgings in different parts of the town), seems to have been, by working on her affection, to extort a still further supply for the purposes of dissipation, by the sale of a portion of her remaining pittance. Having at length obtained this sacrifice, he returned to Valenciennes, where, in 1791, he ended his career of heartless and selfish profligacy.

Byron was but six years old at the period of his father's death, yet he informs us that " he perfectly remembered him;" and probably his very first infant recollections were of scenes of violence and recrimination between his parents. " My mother," he says, " when in a rage with me, (and I gave her cause enough,) would say, ' Ah ! you little dog, you are a Byron all over ; you are as bad as yonr father.' In fact," he continues, " my father was, iu his youth, anything but a Cœlebs in search of a wife. He would have made a bad hero for Hannah More. He ran out three for tunes, and married, or ran away with, three women, and once wanted a guinea, that he wrote for. I have seen the note. He seemed born for his own ruin and that of the other sex. He began by seducing Lady Car marthen, and spent for her 4,000/. a-year ; and not content with one adventure of this kind, afterwards eloped with Miss Gordon.

His marriage wa3 not destined to be a very fortunate oue either. They certainly could not have claimed the flitch." which might well bear out the common belief of his at least partial insanity. It is related in illustration of his strange and quarrelsome habits, that on one occasion when his neighbour, the late Dr. John Warren, was admitted to dine with him, a case of pistols was placed upon the table, as if forming a common and necessary portion of the preparations. No deed, however cruel, was too extravagant to be attributed to so eccentric a being, by his awe-struck neighbours. As his years rolled on, his seclusion became more complete, and his only companions were one or two servants who had grown accustomed to his peculiar habits, and a colony of crickets whom Lord Byron informs us throve under his patronage.

He had rendered them so tame that they would crawl over him, and used to whip them with a straw if too familiar. Tradition says they abandoned the Abbey simultaneously on the day of his death. With the exception of making a few innovations of a fantastic nature, he paid no attention to tlie improvement of the estate, and the Abbey and grounds were suffered to fall into a state of ruinous decay. Of the poet's father the frailties were so openly and recklessly displayed, as to violate not only tlie moral sense, but also the bienseances of the fashionable world, and to banish him in future from the society of his equals in rank. He carried off to the Continent the wife of Lord Carmarthen, and on the noble marquis obtaining a divorce from the lady, married her. After the de.ii.li of this lady in 1784, he formed another alliance, upon grounds entirely mercenary, with a woman who.n he regarded with indifference, or rather, to whom lu must even from the outset have entertained a feeling of actual aversion.

With an old pedigree and all the pride of high descent, nothing, in fact, could be less aristocratic and more really vulgar than the person and manners of this object of his choice; her only redeeming quality being the intense vehemence of her affection for the husband, to whom unhappily this violent fondness could prove but a source of additional disgust. This unfortunate lady was Miss Catherine Gordon, only child and heiress of George Gordon, Esq., of Gight. A Scotch rhymer of the day easily prognosticated the first result of this ill fated union, in the speedy dissipation of the " tocher " which had tempted the southern spendthrift. ' The youth is a rake, from England he's come, The Scotch dinna ken his extraction awa; He keeiis up his misses, his landlord he duns That's fast drawing the la..ds of Gight awa."

Byron was no doubt right in attributing, as lie does, his moral peculiarities and contradictions to the temperament of bis parents and of his race. " I am The prediction was soon realised; the debts of Mr. now tamed," he said to Captain Medwin, " but, be fore I married, showed some of the blood of my an cestors. It is ridiculous to say that we do not inherit our passions, as well as the gout, or any other disorder." The offspring of such an ill-assorted marriage accordingly displayed, from his earliest infancy, much of the wayward violence of his mother's temperament, but combined with her keenly sensitive and naturally affectionate disposition, till tortured by ill-treatment out of its natural current. He exhibited from the first the same sullenness of temper, and stern and unbending obstinacy when assailed — contrasted with as remarkable, and almost excessive, a facility in yielding to the advice of those who affectionately counselled him — that continued to characterize him during the whole of his future career, and of which more than one illustration will appear in the course of these pages.

The naturally morbid hue of his temper was undoubtedly much in creased by the result of an accident that happened at his birth, and, as he once bitterly complained to a friend, "through the false delicacy of his mother." By this accident one of his feet became slightly dis torted, and a degree of lameness was the result. This was only in the left foot ; and it was so little visible to casual notice, that when he lounged about a room in such a manner as to screen it, it was hardly per ceptible. But it was a real and even a sore lameness, and much walking upou it fevered and hurt it. His schoolfellows at Harrow often caused him to feel it bitterly, by cruel practical jokes. Mr. Moore informs us that when a person once remarked to his nurse, in his hearing, "What a pretty boy is Byron! what a pity he has such a leg !

" he struck at her, exclaiming, " Dinna speak of it ! " His mother, when in ill humour with him, used to make this misfortune the subject of taunts and reproaches. This suggested to him the drama of the " Deformed Transformed," in which are the lines : — was often doomed to suffer from this apparently trifling cause. When in love with Miss Chaworth, a circumstance mentioned in his " Memoranda " must have soon deprived him of any lingering hope of a return to his affection. He either was told of it, or heard Miss Chaworth saying to her maid, " Do you think I could care anything for that lame boy?" This speech, as he himself described it, was like a shot through his heart ! Though late at night when he heard it, he darted wildly out of the house, and, scarcely knowing whither he ran, never stopped till he found himself at Newstead Abbey.

Years after that trial, and after he had been at Cambridge, we meet with another instance how he often felt that every blessing he possessed was embittered by this defect. " Nature," he complained, " had set a mark upon him," and rendered him an object of disdain and scoffing to the rest of his species. His reverend friend Mr. Beecher, finding him one day low-spirited, endeavoured to arouse him by painting in their brightest colours the advantages with which Provi dence had endowed him, and, among the greatest, " that of a mind which placed him above the rest of mankind." " Ah ! my dear friend," said Byron, mournfully, "if this" (laying his hand on his fore head) " places me above the rest of mankind, tliat " (pointing to his foot) "places me far — far below them." To the sad heritage of parental temperament and hereditary qualities, and the galling brand of personal deformity, was added a mode of training calculated to develope and exasperate all that was evil in the nature of the youthful Byron.

He soon learned to emulate the fierce tempers of his unhappy parent, to give way to bursts of fury, and then moodily subside into one of what he called his " silent rages." For the firm and steady discipline that could alone have held in check the outbreaks of a temper naturally so fierce and wilful, were alternately substituted the capricious ness of maternal anger and the weakness of mis chievous indulgence ; and thus he was alternately depressed and pampered. Still sadder was the de ficiency on the part of his parent of that gentle and considerate tenderness, which might have drawn out all the affectionate sweetness and playfulness of his disposition, and that tendency to passionHte attachment which formed the real basis of his character. But while his nurses could lead him with a thread, and his infant feelings went forth to them in grate ful affection, to his mother alone his heart was shut, to her refused 10 show its hidden mine of tenderness ; " I could have borne It all — but that my mother spurned me from her.

The shebear licks her cubs into a sort Of shape ; — my dam beheld my shape was hopeless." She would call him " a lame brat." He often spoke of his mother to Lord Sligo with a feeling little short of aversion ; and when they were bathing, he pointed to his naked leg and foot, and said that though he owed it to her false delicacy at his birth, she never ceased to taunt him with it, and uttered once a frightful prayer that he might prove as ill-formed in mind as in body. These and other anecdotes illustrate the agonies he near tlie Lake Rcgillas in the Roman history ; and four years ago, when standing on the heights of Tusculum, and looking down upon the little round lake that was once Regillas, and which dots the immense expanse below, he remembered his young enthusiasm and his old instructor."

He next went through the tutorage of a Mr. Ross and a Mr. Pattison ; the latter, he tells us, being the son of a shoemaker, but a good scholar, as well as a rigid presbyterian. With him he read Latin until he was sent to the grammar school at Aberdeen, where he went through all classes to the fourth. He was but little solicitous to excel, and gave at this time so little promise of his future greatness, that when, in conformity with the custom of the school, the order of the class was so inverted as to make the highest and lowest boys change places, the master used to banter the future poet, who in this way found himself suddenly transported from the lowest to the highest place, by saying, "Now, George, man, let me see how soon you will be at the foot again." Piqued, perhaps, by the consciousness of his physical drawback, he showed himself anxious rather to excel in the sports and pastimes of boyhood, a taste he ever afterwards retained : he was a good hand at marbles, and could spin one further than most boys ; excelling also at " bases," a game which requires long and swift running.

At school, as at home, he was remarked as much for the passionateness as tlie affectionateness of his disposition. Although more ready to give a blow than to take one, he yet displayed thus early the generous spirit which afterwards led him, when at Harrow, to stand up for his younger friends when overborne ; and when unable to protect one of them from the beating threatened by a more powerful opponent, to offer to bear himself a portion of the infliction that he could not avert. and thus was formed the germ of that selfish and bitter misanthropy which the cross of his early affections was afterwards destined to confirm into the lasting habit of his nature. But, unable as she was to inspire him with a feeling of filial affection, his mother could well sow in secret the seeds of that selfish pride of rank and love of distinction which thwarted the more noble and ex pansive tendencies of his mind, and instil dreams of future exaltation to a position which seemed brighter for the poverty and neglect into which they had fallen : and more than one writer has remarked, that Byron was thus in after life prouder of his rank, and more tenacious of its recognition, than those who had been brought up from infancy in the enjoyment of honours to which habit had rendered them comparatively indifferent.

His first nurse, and the sister, Mary Gray, who tuoceeded her, were the first to call forth his childish bisection, and to impart religious and poetical impressions to his mind. While engaged in putting on at bed-time the machines and bandages which were em ployed to straighten his foot, they would often sing him to sleep, or tell him stories and legends, in which, like most other children, he took great delight. They also taught him to repeat a number of the Psalms ; and the first and twenty-third were among the earliest that lie committed to memory, as they have been to many millions of other children. Little beyond what has been already said is known of the influences under which the poet mysteriously grew up amidst the darkness and vexation of infancy and boyhood. The sad influence of temperament and training are sufficiently palpable, but who can trace the hidden springs of genius P There is little enough in the infancy and first boyhood of Byron to shadow forth his future greatness.

During his school days he occasionally accompanied his mother to pay some visits among their friends ; and in 1799, after an attack o*f scarlet fever, she took him, for a change of air, into the Highlands, to a farm house in the neighbourhood of Ballater, forty miles up the Dee, where the dark crest of Lochin y Gair rose frowning in tlie distance, and the sea of mountains ex tending from Ballater to the Linn of Dee. From this period, he tells us, he dated his love of moun tainous countries : It has been already mentioned that Byron's mother had taken up her residence in Aberdeen in very humble circumstances. When not quite five years old, he was sent to a day-school, the terms of which were (as is usual in Scotland) five shillings a quarter. It was a school for both sexes ; where, after remain ing a twelvemonth, he was just able to decipher his letters.

His intellects, he tells us, " were now con signed to a new preceptor, a very devout, clever little clergyman, named Ross, afterwards minister of one of the Kirks (East, I think)." Under him he made rapid progress ; and as soon as he began to read, his ruling -lassion, Uke that of Gibbon, was for history. " He ■\as particularly taken," he says, "with the battle " Ah, there my young footsteps in infancy wandered, My cap was the bonnet, my cloak was the plaid ; On chieftains long perished my memory pondered. As daily I strode through the pine-covered vaele. I sought not my home till the day's dying glory Gave place to the rays of the bright polar star, For fancy was cheered by traditional story, Disclosed by the natives of dark Loch-naGaer ' _,' a © a 1M _ 1 . g © 1 _ ed fe _ _ V He recalled to memory heroic deeds of "his maternal ancestors, many of whom, as before stated, were cut off in the ill-fated insurrection so sadly terminated by the bloody field of Culloden. . . . old channel."

"I was half a Scot by birth, and bred a whole one," he says in "Don Juan;" and amidst far distant scenes, memory and association would often recal to him the localities where his days of troubled boyhood were spent. '* Still were you happy in death's earthy slumber, You rest with your clan in the caves of Braemar, " As auld langsyne brings Scotland, one and all, Scotch plaids, Scotch woods, the "alue hills, and clear The pibroch resounds to the piper's loud number Your deeds in the echoes of dark Loch-na-Gar." streams — The Dee, the Don, Balgounie brig's black wall, All my boy feelings, all my gentle drearm,. Such scenes and recollections, young as he was, must, no doubt, have deeply impressed him. He could never forget the effect, a few years afterwards in England, of the only thing he had long seen, even in miniature, of a mountain — in the Malvern Hills, which he viewed every sunset with a sensation he was unable to describe.

Henceforth, throughout the course of his troubled career, Of what 1 then dreamt, clothed in their own pall Like Banquo's otfspring ; — floating past me seems My childhood in this childishness of mine : — 1 care not — 'tis a glimpse of auld langsyne ! " " The brig of Don," he adds in the note, "near the 'auldtoun' of Aberdeen, with its one arch, and its black, deep salmon-stream, is in my memory as yester day. I still remember, though perhaps I may mis quote, the awful proverb which made me pause to cross it, and yet lean over it with childish delight, being an only son, at least by the mother's side. The saying, as recollected by me, was this, but 1 have never heard nor seen it since I was nine years of age : " High mountains were a feeling ; " and to his long and soUtary excursions among the wild beauties of the Highlands may be traced his solemn enjoyment of the grander scenes in Greece, or Spain, or Switzerland, which ever recalled to him the blue hills of Morven, amidst which he had first wandered. ' Brig of Balgounie, black 's your wa' : Wi' a wife's ae sou, and a mear's ae foal, Down ye shall fa'.' " " To sit on rocks, to muse o'er flood and fell, Slowly to trace the forest's shady scene, Where tilings that own not man's dominion dwell, And mortal foot hath ne'er, or rarely been ; To climb the trackless mountain all unseen With the wild flock that never needs a fold; Alone o'er steeps and foaming falls to lean " — It was at this early period that he felt the first vague stirrings of that master passion which was destined to exercise so powerful and lasting an in fluence over him — to torture his existence, and inspire him, as Goethe said, with "the genius of pain."

When not eight years old he fell in love, and with a mere child like himself, Mary Dull*. After seventeen years had passed, and he had known all the bitterness of another and a most unhappy attachment, he yet vividly recalled aU the circumstances of this childish amour. Of sexual feelings he was ignorant, but yet his misery, as he calls it, for this girl, was excessive ; and when, after a long interval of forgetfulness, he suddenly heard of her marriage, he was overcome as with an electric stroke. Everything connected with his attachment and the loveliness of its object, rose vividly to his recollection ; her features, her dark hair and eyes, her caresses, his restlessness and sleepless ness, his unaccountable torment, and the whole in fluence of a violent but half-developed passion. was, even at this early period, one of his principal sources of delight.

On one occasion he had a narrow escape of his Use. While visiting the Liun of Dee, his foot became entangled in the heather, and he was rolUng to the brink of the abyss, when happily arrested just in time to prevent his destruction. These rambles, there can be Uttle doubt, first drew forth his poetic faculty. He observed to Mcdwiu that he knew not from whom he inherited verse making ; probably the wild scenery of Morven and Loch-ua-Gar, and the banks of the Dee, were the parents of liis poetical vein, and the developers of his poetical fancy ; but if so, he contmues, it was dormant — at least, he never wrote anything worth men tioning till he was in love. He passed his boyhood, he teUs us, at Mar Lodge, near Aberdeen, occasionally visiting the Highlands ; and long retained an affection for Scotland; that, he supposes, was imbibed from his mother.

His love for it, he confesses, was at one time much shaken by the critique in the " Edin burgh Review" on the "Hours of Idleness," and he transferred a portion of his dislike to the country. At length, by the death of his grand-uncle, in May 1798, a total revolution took place in the circumstances of Lord Byron and his mother. From a state of obscurity and penury they suddenly arose to dis tinction and opulence ; and exchanged the tenancy of a shabby lodging in a remote town of Scotland for the " But my 'Affection for it soon flowed back into its possessorship of an ancient and aristocratic pile in tt* EngUsh peer recoiled with a feeling of insuperable disgust ? Abandoned in consequence, without check or control, to maternal guidance, Lord Byron's mind continued its development under the same mischievous influences wliich have been already pointed out ; his self-will, which had received so dangerous an increase by his sudden elevation to rank and wealth, was, in addition, fostered by every description of injudicious indulgence ; he was encouraged, as he confesses, by servants in aU his violence of temper, and was used to command at an age when self-control, and obedience to wise authority, are the only conditions of a safe and healthy development of character.