Byron

Front matter

By ANDRE MAURQIS

A TIME FOR SILENCE

THE MIRACLE OF ENGLAND

Part I Chapter

I. The Byrons of Newstead ... 3

II. The Gordons of Gight .... 13

III. Predestination . 24

IV. Little Lord Byron . 34

V. Harrow-on-the-Hill .... 43

VI. The Morning Star . 49

VII. Romantic Friendships — the Dow¬ ager . 57

VIII. Gods on Mount Ida . 7^

IX. Trinity College, Cambridge . . 77

X. Hours of Idleness . 86

XI. The Trinity Musketeers ... 99

XII. The Polished Skull . 108

XIII^ Childe Harold’s First Pilgrimage 124

Part II

XIV. Timon OF Newstead . iS^

XV. Annus Mirabilis .

xiii

CONTENTS

CHAPTER

XVII.

The Gods in Lucretius .

•

PAGE

XVIII.

Augusta .

•

XIX.

The Nearest Perch ....

XX.

The Corsair .

XXL

Betrothal .

XXII.

Marriage .

XXIII.

Tfie Treacle-Moon ....

XXIV.

XXV.

“Fare Thee Well ...”

XXVI.

Part III XXVII

Avalanches .

XXVIII.

“A Fairy City of the Heart . .

n

XXIX.

Palazzo Mocenigo ....

XXX.

Cavaliere Servente ....

XXXI.

XXXII.

Shipwrecks .

XXXIII.

XXXIV.

Hero and Soldier ....

XXXV.

Hamlet and Don Quixote .

Chronological Table .

Index . 591

XIV

ILLUSTRATIONS

From the Leigh Hunt miniature ....

Mrs. Byron .

After a painting by Thomas Stewardson

frontispiece FACING PAGE

The Terrace of Annesley Hall . . . .

•

Mrs. Musters [Mary Chaworth] . . . .

After a painting by Thomas Phillips

•

The Courtyard of Newstead Abbey

From a photograph by W alter North

•

no

George Gordon, Lord Byron .

Lady Caroline Lamb in Her Page’s Coat . After a miniature by an unknown artist

•

Jane Elizabeth, Countess of Oxford .

After the painting by Hoppner in the National Gallery

Augusta Leigh .

After a drawing by Sir George Hayter in the Museum

British

Anne Isabella, Lady Byron .

After an engraving from a painting by W . J . Newton

Sarah, Countess of Jersey .

After the painting by Sir Thomas Lawrence

•

Page from the Manuscript of “Don Juan”

•

Teresa, Countess Guiccioli .

After a sketch by Count D’Orsay, October 77, /Sj9

Byron, at Venice, 1820 .

After a drawing by G. H. Harlow

After a sketch by Count H’Orsay , May, 182J

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PAUL VALERY.

Even if Calvinism had been carved on tables of stone and handed down from Heaven by the Almighty Hand, it would not have lived if it had not been found to agree more or less with the facts.

MARK RUTHERFORD

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I

THE BYRONS OF NEWSTEAD iSoo-i'/84

Through the enchanted Sherwood Forest, close to Nottingham, a little band of black-habited monks, canons regular of the Augustinian Order, came wandering among the oaks. King Henry the Second of England, threatened with excommunication for the murder of Thomas a Becket, had promised the Pope to do penance and to endow monasteries. A site was chosen in a valley, close to a spring and a lake; the trees were felled, to the glory of God and for the salva¬ tion of the king’s soul; a wide tract of land was cleared. The Gothic windows, ogive and rose, took shape in the grey stone, and a cloister, small but exquisite. Monastic severity was tempered by the charm of a landscape of streams and woods. The Abbey had been dedicated to the Blessed Virgin, and was given the name of Newstead, “the new place,” Sancta Maria Novi Loci.

The rule of the Order was simple. The monks were forbidden to have any private possessions; they were to love God and their neighbours, conquer the flesh by fast¬ ing, give no man cause of offence, and avert their eyes from women. In addition, they distributed yearly alms to the poor in memory of their founder.

For three centuries the Abbots of Newstead reigned in steady succession on the borders of the lake. Then times grew harder, the piety of the faithful more grudg¬ ing. The taste for learning was spreading; the gifts of monarchs passed to colleges, to universities, to hospitals. This community born of a king’s remorse was threatened by a king’s caprice. “Mistress Anne Boleyn is not one of the handsomest women in the world. She is of mid¬ dling stature, swarthy complexion, long neck, wide mouth, bosom not much raised, and in fact has nothing but the king’s great appetite and her eyes which are black and beautiful.” But she was nevertheless the cause of a great schism. King Henry the Eighth requested the Pope to annul the bull authorising his marriage with Catherine of Aragon. The Pope refused. The peers of the Boleyn faction assured the king that by repudiating the pon¬ tifical authority and proclaiming himself head of the English Church, he could satisfy at once his love of Anne and his love of gold.

All religious houses with an income of less than two hundred pounds were declared confiscate to the Crown, and a visitation of the monasteries was begun by ecclesi¬ astical and fiscal commissioners. The law, always ven¬ erated In England, required that a “voluntary surrender” should be obtained from the monks; and a certain Dr. John London became famous for his skill In methods of swift persuasion. ^Wlth the signing of the deed, the king took possession of the monastic house, sold whatever it might contain, and gave the estates to some great land¬ lord, of whose fidelity to the new Church he thus made certain. The sale of goods ruined the monks, but brought little wealth to the king. Manuscripts were bought by hucksters for wrapping up their goods; the inventory of a library would become simply — “Old books In the choir: 6 pence.” Of the clerks thus despoiled, a certain num¬ ber received authorisation to exercise a secular ministry, whilst others were given a few shillings’ pension; almost

THE BYRONS OF NEWSTEAD all left the country, making for Ireland, Scotland, or Flanders. “Thus was the Church made a prey, every bad bird daring to beautify himself with her fair feath¬ ers.”

At Newstead, Dr. London had the deed of surrender signed by the prior, John Blake, and seven canons, on July 21, 1539. The prior received a pension of £26, and each of the others £3 6s. 8d. Before leaving, the monks cast into the lake their founder’s charter, and a lectern surmounted by a brass eagle which they had managed to abstract from Dr. London’s soldiery. Then they de¬ parted. Henceforth there was none to pray beneath the yews of Newstead for the souls of the kings. Already the head of Mistress Anne Boleyn, crowned with its black tresses, had been slashed off by the executioner’s sword. The country-folk mourned the passing of the monks, believing that they would still haunt their empty cells, and that the Abbey would bring ill luck to any man bold enough to buy it. A year later, in 1540, King Henry sold the monastery for £800 to his faithful sub¬ ject Sir John Byron, known as “Little Sir John with the Great Beard.”

The Byron who thus succeeded the canons of New¬ stead was the head of one of the oldest families in the county. The Byrons, or Buruns, had come over from Normandy with the Conqueror, and distinguished them¬ selves in the Crusades, as later at the siege of Calais; they were the owners of great landed estates, not only in the neighbourhood of Nottingham, but also at Roch¬ dale and Clayton in Lancashire. Their motto was Crede Biron, “Trust in Biron” — for they wrote the name thus in French fashion, being kinsmen of the Marquis de Biron. “Little Sir John with the Great Beard” transformed the Gothic Abbey into an embattled castle; and to that seat his descendants remained faithful. One of them, a staunch friend of King Charles the First in the Civil War a hundred years later, commanded a cavalry regiment with equal measure of bravery and rashness; he charged too soon at Edgehill, and again at Marston Moor, and for this double blunder was made a peer of the realm as Baron Byron of Rochdale, while Prince Rupert made an entry in his journal: “by the improper charge of Lord Byron, much harm was done.” But the new lord’s constancy was of more worth than his strategy. He never abandoned the royal cause. Newstead was besieged by the Parliamentarians ; sulphur and molten lead spattered the ancient walls; those glassy waters which once had borne so clearly the sound of hymn and psalm, now cast back into the woods the cries of the stricken, the clashing of muskets, the blare of trumpets. After the triumph of Cromwell, Lord Byron was among Charles the Second’s entourage in France; nor did his loyalty waver there, for Lady Byron, his wife (Mr. Pepys informs us), was the exiled monarch’s seventeenth mistress.

Round the Abbey, however, the forest was slowly re¬ treating before the advance of tilled fields, farms, and villages. Great herds of deer roved among the oaks. The Byrons’ demesne was no longer isolated, since other rich families had come and raised their houses in this countryside. Of these the finest, and the nearest, was Annesley, the seat of the Chaworths, which was joined to Newstead by a long avenue of oaks, known as the “Bridal Path” : for the two families had been united by the marriage of the third Lord Byron with Elizabeth, daughter of Viscount Chaworth. This third baron, who

THE BYRONS OF NEWSTEAD

lived on until the end of the seventeenth century, was almost totally ruined. Time had made good the proph¬ ecies foretold when the Ahbey was put up for sale; the phantom of a black-hooded monk wandered by night through the vaulted corridors, and the family fortune was ill-starred. The dark legend of the Byrons was finally and for ever confirmed by the two sons of the fourth baron; for the elder, the fifth Lord Byron, was tried by his peers for murder, and the younger, a sailor, became the most luckless admiral of the realm.

The story of the fifth Lord Byron’s murder of his cousin, Mr. Chaworth, the proprietor of Annesley, is tragically puerile. The county gentlemen coming up to London from Notts were in the habit of forgathering, once a month, at the Star and Garter tavern in Pall Mall. On January 26, 1765, the usual meeting had gone off very cheerfully, when talk turned upon the best methods of preserving game. Mr. Chaworth was strong for dealing sternly with poachers; Lord Byron declared that the best way to preserve game was to pay no heed to it. Mr. Chaworth then remarked, rather acrimoniously, that he himself and Sir Charles Sedley, a common neighbour of theirs, had more game on five acres than Lord Byron had on all his manors, and were it not for their precau¬ tions, Lord Byron would no longer have a single hare on his land. Lord Byron asked where Sir Charles Sedley’s manors lay. And Mr. Chaworth replied: “If you want information with respect to Sir Charles Sedley, he lives in Dean Street, and, as to myself, your lordship knows very well where to find me.”

These drily uttered words had closed the conversation; but on leaving the room, Lord Byron found Mr. Cha¬ worth on the staircase. The two men exchanged a few words, and then asked a waiter to show them to an empty room. The waiter placed a candlestick on the table; the two gentlemen closed the door behind them; and a few minutes later a bell rang. The innkeeper found Mr. Chaworth and Lord Byron at grips, and the former severely wounded. He was carried to his lodgings and there died.

A peer accused of murder could be tried only by the H ouse of Lords, and a few months later Lord Byron was invited to place himself in custody in the Tower of London. Thence, in a coach escorted by mounted guards, he was conveyed to Westminster Hall. The executioner’s axe was placed beside his lordship, the blade turned toward him. The county gentry who had been present on the day of the altercation were examined; the first witness gave the cautious reply: “My ears are not the best at any time.” A surgeon explained how the sword had penetrated the navel and made a wide gash in the stomach ; asked whether this wound had been the cause of Mr. Chaworth’s death, he said he had no doubt of it. Lord Byron then tendered a plea of Not Guilty, and the vote was taken, starting with the peers of the most recent creation anc|^ ending with the princes of the blood. The accused was found Not Guilty of murder, but Guilty of homicide; and this, by virtue of a special statute af¬ fecting peers, was tantamount to acquittal. The usher called out his “Oyez! Oyez!” and judgment was read out. The Lord High Steward snapped his white wand, and William, fifth Lord Byron, was set at liberty to return to his seat at Newstead.

As a matter of fact, none of the friends of either com¬ batant could really regard the murderer as a grave offender, for Mr. Chaworth had notoriously been a fire-

THE BYRONS OF NEWSTEAD eating bully. The victor, to his dying day, kept the sword with which he had killed his cousin hung on his bedroom wall. But locally, where he had long been known as “Wicked Lord,” the crime transmuted him Into a creature of legend and terror. Appalling tales were told, some of them quite false. It was untrue, for in¬ stance, that In a burst of fury he had shot his coachman dead with a pistol, placed the corpse beside his wife Inside the carriage, and himself driven the grisly^ couple home. Nor was it true that he had flung his wife into one of the Abbey ponds to drown her. But It was true that his temper was vile, that he always carried pistols In his belt, and that he drove the unhappy Lady Byron to flight from Newstead. He immediately replaced her with a servant-girl known to the villagers as “Lady Betty.”

Under the sordid rule of Lady Betty the Abbey be¬ came a pigsty. The servant-mistress made a cowshed of the Gothic chapel, and turned some of the splendid vaulted halls into stables. As for the Wicked Lord, his severance from mankind was completed by the marriage of his only son with a cousin-german, a match decided upon against the father’s judgment. Thenceforward Lord Byron did all that he could to ruin his heirs. He paid his gambling debts with the oaks of the park, felling five thousand pounds’ worth and stripping his marvellous forest nearly bare of timber. Horace Walpole passed that way about this time and noted; “Newstead delighted me. There Is grace and Gothic Indeed, — good chambers and a comfortable house.” But the present lord, he added, was a madman, who had cut down all his trees, “and planted a handful of Scotch firs, that look like ploughboys dressed in old family liveries for a public day.” As a finishing touch in the spoliation of his son, Lord Byron killed two thousand seven hundred head of deer in the park, and granted a twenty-one years lease of the Rochdale estate, where coal-seams had just been dis¬ covered, at the ridiculous rental of sixty pounds a year.

His pleasures were those of a mischievous child. He would go down in the dark and open sluice-gates on the streams in order to damage the cotton-mills; he emptied his neighbours’ ponds; and on the edge of his own lake he had two small stone forts constructed, with a fleet of toy ships which he used sometimes to launch. He would spend whole days directing naval battles between the ves¬ sels and the forts; they fired on each other with miniature cannon. Lord Byron crouched in one of the forts, whilst his manservant, Joe Murray, lay stretched in a boat com¬ manding the fleet. Sometimes, again, his lordship would lie on the stone flags of the Abbey kitchen and amuse himself by staging races of crickets up and down his own body, flipping the insects with straws when they were sluggish. The servants used to say that these crickets knew their own master and obeyed him.

His young brother’s life had been no less rich in drama. John Byron, grandfather of our hero, was a sailor, gallant but unlucky, and known to his shipmates as Foulweather Jack because he could never set sail with¬ out a storm brewing. He had been appointed midship¬ man in the storeship Wager ^ which was to take part In an expedition against the Spanish Colonies but foundered on a reef off the Chili coast. It was a terrible scene : enormous waves came dashing over the wreck; one sailor went raving mad; the crew mutinied; the captain had to fire point-blank on his men. Young Byron, however, composed an account of the shipwreck, which he published

lO

THE BYRONS OF NEWSTEAD later as the Narrative, containing an account of the great distresses suffered by himself and his companions on the coast of Patagonia. The Narrative had some success and became, in its way, a classic of the sea.

In 1764 Captain Byron was ordered to make a voy¬ age of discovery round the globe aboard his ship Dolphin. He passed through the straits of Magellan, saw once more the coast of Patagonia, and completed his trip round the world so rapidly that he discovered no land at all, except the Disappointment Islands. Yet, as his biog¬ rapher remarked, there were so many unknown lands to be discovered on his course, that he must have had great difficulty in steering clear of them. On his return this discreet explorer was appointed Governor of New¬ foundland, and later advanced to be vice-admiral; in which capacity, during the American war, he commanded a fleet despatched to intercept the French fleet under the Comte d’Estaing. The first time that Admiral Byron put to sea, he met with a terrific storm which sank one of his vessels and disabled several others. The second time, he fell in with Estaing, but, loyal to family traditions, he attacked too soon and was beaten. After this he was entrusted with no further commands, and died, still a vice-admiral, in 1786.

Admiral Byron had two sons. The elder John (father of our hero), was a soldier, whilst the second, George Anson, was in the navy. .John had been trained in a French military academy, and entered the Guards, serving in the American war while he was still hardly more than a boy. His violent character, wild behaviour and soaring debts, gave him the well-earned nickname of “Mad Jack”; and on his return to London at the age of twenty he made a total conquest of the Marchioness of

Carmarthen, a young woman of great beauty whose hus¬ band, Lord Carmarthen, Duke of Leeds, was the Lord Chamberlain. He was a kindly and cultivated man, but his wife doubtless preferred young Captain Byron’s wild¬ ness; for no sooner did her father’s death leave her with the title of Baroness Conyers and an Inheritance of £4,000 a year, than she fled with her lover, deserting the Lord Chamberlain and her three children. Lord Car¬ marthen obtained the divorce for which he petitioned.

For some time the young couple lived at Aston Hall, a house belonging to Lady Conyers; then, seeking refuge from scandalmongers and creditors alike, they crossed over to France. There Lady Conyers gave birth to a daughter, the Hon. Augusta Byron, and died In 1784. Her death was due, said fashionable London, to her hus¬ band’s Ill-treatment; to rashness, said the Byrons, In hav¬ ing gone out hunting when hardly risen from her con¬ finement. Her Income was a life-interest only, and van¬ ished with her.

II THE GORDONS OF GIGHT 1784-iygo

Bath was at that time the fashionable spa; and I thither the young widower proceeded, to air his grief as he walked Its curving terraces. There he made the acquaintance of a young Scottish lady, an orphan and an heiress. Miss Catherine Gordon of Gight. Small and plump, with a long nose and too high a colour, she was far from being a beauty. But her father’s death had left her the mistress of her own property, and she owned some £23,000; £3,000 of this was in ready cash, which was useful for settling pressing debts, and the bal¬ ance was represented by the Gight estates, salmon fish¬ ings, and shares in an Aberdeen bank.

Catherine Gordon might not be beautiful, but she was of good birth, and “proud as Lucifer” of her name, which was one of the most honourable in Scotland. The first laird of Gight, Sir William Gordon, had been the son of the Earl of Huntly and Annabella Stuart, sister of King James the Second. But although the family history opened thus royally, a more tragic sequence of events could hardly be imagined. William Gordon was drowned, Alexander Gordon murdered, John Gordon hanged for the killing of Lord Moray in 1592, another John Gor¬ don hanged in 1634 for the assassination of Wallenstein — It seemed as If a Gordon of Gight had been strung up on every branch of their family tree. In Scotland longer than elsewhere, manners had remained feudal, almost indeed barbaric. A Gordon did not hesitate to waylay in a lonely place an Aberdeen lawyer who had actually dared to seize the horse of a friend of his; and if the Crown authorities thereupon called the citizens of Aber¬ deen to arms to arrest the offender, the townsfolk cannily sat tight. A dangerous breed of well-born brigands thus came into being, and even in childhood their temper was clearly shown. In i6io three young Gordons barricaded themselves in the Aberdeen Grammar School, and there, with sword and pistol, resisted an all-night attack. It was something beyond their control, something inborn. The sixth laird, a conscious evildoer, used to say: “I can tak’ no rest. I know I will die upon a scaffold. There is an evil turn In my hand.”

For a whole century these lairds of GIght kept the north country in terror. The Scottish ballads told plenty of their exploits of these cruel, fascinating, cynical men. There Is one that tells of a Gordon who was adored by his wife whilst he himself loved the lady of Bignet. He was sentenced to death for the murder of five or¬ phans whose fortune he coveted, and on the day of his execution his wife came to beg the king’s pardon:

Nae jealousie could move me;

The birds in air that fly in pairs Can witness how I lo’e ye.

The king was touched and granted a pardon; but when he was set free Gordon turned on his wife, crying fiercely :

A finger o’ Bignet’s lady’s hand Is worth a’ your fair body!

Such were the lairds of GIght, men marked with the brand of Cain; and even although the Crown became stronger during the eighteenth century and was able to compel a respect for law, the string of violent deaths went on as before. Alexander Gordon was drowned; his son George Gordon was drowned (doubtless suicidally) in the Bath Canal. And this last-named was the father of the Catherine Gordon who, a few years later, was inflamed by the gallant eyes of Captain Byron with a love as fierce and reckless as that of her ancestress in the ballad.

She had been brought up by her grandmother, a Duff, likewise of course a Scotswoman, by whom she was in¬ stilled with the rigid thriftiness of their people; and Mrs. Duff had also seen to it that Catherine received a pretty fair education and was imbued with the traditionally Whig politics of the Duffs. Catherine Gordon was fond of reading, and wrote letters which were confused in appearance but swift and lively in style. She had all the violent temper of the Gordons, and no less of their im¬ pulsiveness in action. But she also had their courage, as was made very plain when she married this most formidable of husbands on, of all days. May 13, 1784, and at Bath, the very place where her father had drowned himself.

The young couple went north to settle at Gight, which was a fine estate. But they received none too warm a welcome from the relatives and friends of the Gordons. Into these puritan fastnesses Captain Byron had imported his habits of dissipation, and every night there was danc¬ ing and drinking at Gight. Some cousins of Mrs. Byron who came one Saturday evening were terror-stricken as they wondered whether even the Sabbath would be re¬ spected: “the reels left off just before the clock struck midnight.” The Scots looked scornfully on this stranger, this Southron, this Englishman, who was flinging a Scot¬ tish fortune to the winds, and they blamed the light¬ headed heiress who fancied herself a beauty, decked herself with feathers and silks, hid the squatness of her neck under strings of jewellery, and had found a husband just with her money. “O whaur are ye ga en? sang the nameless rhymesters :

O whaur are ye ga’en, bonny Miss Gordon?

O whaur are ye ga’en, sae bonny and braw ?

To squander the lands of Gight awa .

This youth is a rake, f rae England he’s come ;

The Scots dinna ken his extraction ava;

He keeps up his misses, his landlord he duns,

That’s fast drawen the lands o’ Gight awa’.

And the rhymesters spoke truth. The young Sassenach was quickly scattering the Gordon fortune. The first thing to go was the £3»ooo of ready money; after which, the captain made his wife sell the shares in the Aberdeen Banking Company, and then the salmon fishings. Next, the woods of the estate were stripped, and £8,000 was borrowed on mortgage. On the banks of a loch near Gight there were herons which had nestled there for cen¬ turies, and to which an old family saying attached a prophetic value :

When the herons leave the tree The Laird o’ Gight will landless be.

And in the year 1786 the Gight herons took flight across the water on to Lord Haddo’s ground. “Let the birds come,” said he, “and do them no harm, for the land will soon follow.” And in the following year he purchased the estate for £17,850, a sum which the Scots lawyers wisely resolved to keep in their own hands, as creditors were making trouble.

A year before this the Byrons had left Gight; it had become too heavy for their poverty to bear. They wan¬ dered about England for a while and then, when the bailiffs became too familiar, they crossed the Channel. Mrs. Byron’s relatives in Scotland bewailed the lot of “the poor unhappy creature,” and they were right: her life was a sorry one. In France her husband, a crony of the Marshal de Biron, who treated him as a kinsman, became the friend of several great noblemen, and entered on a life of gambling and amours, extravagance and debt. Yet Catherine Gordon kept up her courage, good Scots¬ woman that she was, lived thriftily, and struggled hard to bring up little Augusta. At Chantilly, where the couple spent a long time, Augusta was very ill, and was nursed by her step-mother. “I still recollect with a degree' of horror the many sleepless nights and days of agony I have passed by your bedside drowned in tears, while you lay insensible and at the gates of death. Your recovery certainly was wonderful, and thank God I did my duty.” And indeed she had no cause for selfreproach. She adored her “Byr-r-ron,” whose name she pronounced with her native rolling of the “r”; she loved his beauty, his brutal sincerity, and his recklessness — but she dreaded the future. In 1787 she became preg¬ nant. When the time of her confinement drew near, she longed to return to England. Augusta’s maternal grand¬ mother, Lady Holderness, thereupon offered to take over the little girl, who was thenceforth brought up by her mother’s family.

In London this strange descendant of the Stuarts found herself a lodging In a genteel enough quarter. Her con¬ dition was that In which women feel the greatest need of protection, but she found herself forsaken; the captain was living at Dover or in Paris, only visited her to ask for money, and in a week had spent the sums which he squeezed from her Indulgence. The only person in the world who concerned himself with her was a lawyer, to whom she had been recommended by friends in Aberdeen, Mr. John Hanson, whose wife put Mrs. Byron in touch with a nurse, Mrs. Mills, and a man-midwife, Mr. Combe. And on January 22, 1788, the child was born. He was named George Gordon Byron, for there was a testamentary condition that the heir of the Gordons of Gight should bear their name. That name was his sole heritage.

On her return to England Mrs. Byron had learned that she was ruined, reduced even to penury. The sale of Gight had been in vain, for the captain’s appetite was such that he could swallow up one estate a month. No sooner had one promissory note been paid off than others kept surging up. The lawyers in Scotland wrote stern letters to their client. A bill of exchange for £400 signed “Jack Byron,” wa^ presented by a broker in Paris; dur¬ ing the same week £50 had to be sent to Mrs. Byron in London, and £30 to Mr. Byron at Dover. Things could not go on like that. Already only £4,222 was left over from the monies obtained for the Gight estate, and of that £1,222 were earmarked as burdens on the prop¬ erty; the remaining £3,000 was invested at five per cent., settled on Mrs. Byron and her son inalienably, and the Scots lawyer entrusted a colleague In London with the payment to Mrs. Byron of £150 per annum in small The very first Sunday she sent her servant-girl to sums.