agitated, and that he was thinking of the nobleman to whom he had once looked for a hand and countenance in his introduction. There were very few persons in the House. Lord Eldon was going through some ordinary business. When Lord Byron had taken the oaths, the Chancellor quitted his seat, and went towards him with a smile, putting out his hand warmly to welcome him; and, though I did not catch the words, I saw that he paid him some compliment. This was all thrown away upon Lord Byron, who made a stiff bow, and put the tips of his fingers into the Chancellor's hand. The Chancellor did not press a welcome so received, but resumed his seat; while Lord Byron carelessly seated himself for a few minutes on one of the empty benches to the left of the throne, usually occupied by the lords in Opposition. When, on his joining me, I expressed what I had felt, he said, 'If I had shaken hands heartily, he would have set me down for one of his party; but I will have nothing to do with them on either side. I have taken my seat, and now I will go abroad.'" A few days later the English Bards and Scotch Reviewers appeared before the public. The first anonymous edition was exhausted in a month; a second, to which the author gave his name, quickly followed. He was wont at a later date to disparage this production, and frequently recanted many of his verdicts in marginal notes. Several, indeed, seem to have been dictated by feelings so transitory, that in the course of the correction of proof blame was turned into praise, and praise into blame; ie., he wrote in MS. before he met the agreeable author "I leave topography to coxcomb Gell; ' we have his second thought in the first edition, before he saw the Troad "I leave topography to classic Gell; and this third, half-way in censure, in the fifth "I leave topography to rapid Gell.” Of such materials are literary judgments made! The success of Byron's satire was due to the fact of its being the only good thing of its kind since Churchill-for in the Baviad and Maviad only butterflies were broken upon the wheel-and to its being the first promise of a new power. The Bards and Reviewers also enlisted sympathy, from its vigorous attack upon the critics who had hitherto assumed the prerogative of attack. Jeffrey and Brougham were seethed in their own milk; and outsiders, whose credentials were still being examined, as Moore and Campbell, came in for their share of vigorous vituperation. The Lakers fared worst of all. It was the beginning of the author's life-long war, only once relaxed, with Southey. Wordsworth-though 42 against this passage is written "unjust," a concession not much sooner made than withdrawn-is dubbed an idiot, who "Both by precept and example shows That prose is verse, and verse is only prose;" and Coleridge, a baby—— "To turgid ode and tumid stanza dear.” The lines ridiculing the encounter between Jeffery and Moore are a fair specimen of the accuracy with which the author had caught the ring of Pope's antithesis : : "The surly Tolbooth scarcely kept her place. Meanwhile Byron had again retired to Newstead, where he invited some choice spirits to hold a few weeks of farewell revel. Matthews, one of these, gives an account of the place, and the time they spent there-entering the mansion between a bear and a wolf, amid a salvo of pistol-shots; sitting up to all hours, talking politics, philosophy, poetry; hearing stories of the dead lords, and the ghost of the Black Brother; drinking their wine out of the skull-cup which the owner had made out of the cranium of some old monk dug up in the garden; breakfasting at two, then reading, fencing, riding, cricketing, sailing on the lake, and playing with the bear or teasing the wolf. The party broke up without having made themselves responsible for any of the orgies of which Childe Harold raves, and which Dallas in good earnest accepts as veracious, when the poet and his friend Hobhouse started for Fal mouth, on their way "outre mer." CHAPTER IV. TWO YEARS OF TRAVEL. THERE is no romance of Munchausen or Dumas more marvel lous than the adventures attributed to Lord Byron abroad. At tached to his first expedition are a series of narratives, by profess ing eye-witnesses, of his intrigues, encounters, acts of diablerie and of munificence, in particular of his roaming about the isles of Greece and taking possession of one of them, which have all the same relation to reality as the Arabian Nights to the actual reign of Haroun Al Raschid.* Byron had far more than an average share of the émigré spirit, the counterpoise in the English race of their otherwise arrogant isolation. He held with Wilhelm Meister "To give space for wandering is it, That the earth was made so wide;" and wrote to his mother from Athens: "I am so convinced of the advantages of looking at mankind, instead of reading about them, and the bitter effects of staying at home with all the narrow prejudices of an islander, that I think there should be a lew amongst us to send our young men abroad for a term, among the few allies our wars have left us.' 22 On June 11th, having borrowed money at heavy interest, and stored his mind with information about Persia and India, the contemplated but unattained goal of his travels, he left London accompanied by his friend Hobhouse, Fletcher his valet, Joe Murray his old butler, and Robert Rushton, the son of one of his tenants, supposed to be represented by the Page in Childe Harold. The two latter, the one on account of his age, the other from his health breaking down, he sent back to England from Gibraltar. Becalmed for some days at Falmouth, a town which he describes as "full of Quakers and salt fish," he despatched letters to *Those who wish to read them are referred to the large three volumes-published in 1825, by Mr. Iley, Portman Square-of anonymous authorship. his mother, Drury, and Hodgson, exhibiting the changing moods of his mind. Smarting under a slight he had received at parting from a school-companion, who had excused himself from a farewell meeting on the plea that he had to go shopping, he at one moment talks of his desolation, and says that, " leaving England without regret," he had thought of entering the Turkish service; in the next, especially in the stapzas to Hodgson, he runs off into a strain of boisterous buffoonery. On the 2nd of July, the packet by which he was bound sailed for Lisbon, and arrived there about the middle of the month, when the English fleet was anchored in the Tagus. The poet in some of his stanzas has described the fine view of the port and the disconsolate dirtiness of the city itself, the streets of which were at that time rendered dangerous by the frequency of religious and political assassinations. Nothing else remains of his sojourn to interest us, save the statement of Mr. Hobhouse, that his friend made a more perilous, though less celebrated, achievement by water than his crossing the Hellespont, in swimming from old Lisbon to Belem Castle. Byron praises the neigh bouring Cintra as "the most beautiful village in the world," though he joins with Wordsworth in heaping anathemas on the Convention, and extols the grandeur of Mafra, the Escurial of Portugal, in the convent of which a monk, showing the traveller a large library, asked if the English had any books in their country. Despatching his baggage and servants by sea to Gibraltar, he and his friend started on horseback through the south-west of Spain. Their first resting-place, after a ride of 400 miles, performed at an average rate of seventy in the twenty-four hours, was Seville, where they lodged for three days in the house of two ladies, to whose attractions, as well as the fascination he seems to have exerted over them, the poet somewhat garrulously refers. Here, too, he saw, parading on the Prado, the famous Maid of Saragossa, whom he celebrates in his equally famous stanzas (Childe Harold, I., 54-58). Of Cadiz, the next stage, he writes with enthusiasm as a modern Cythera, describing the bull-fights in his verse, and the beauties in glowing prose. The belles of this city, he says, are the Lancashire witches of Spain; and by reason of them, rather than the sea-shore or the Sierra Morena, "sweet Cadiz is the first spot in the creation." Hence, by an English frigate, they sailed to Gibraltar, for which place he has nothing but curses. Byron had no sympathy with the ordinary forms of British patriotism, and in our great struggle with the tyranny of the First Empire, he may almost be said to have sympathised with Napoleon. The ship stopped at Cagliari, in Sardinia, and again at Girgenti, on the Sicilian coast. Arriving at Malta, they halted there for three weeks-time enough to establish a sentimental, though Platonic, flirtation with Mrs. Spencer Smith, wife of our minister at Constan tinople, sister-in-law of the famous admiral, and the heroine of some exciting adventures. She is the "Florence" of Childe Harold and is afterwards addressed in some of the most graceful verses of his cavalier minstrelsy "Do thou, amidst the fair white walls, At times from out her latticed halls The only other adventure of the visit is Byron's quarrel with an officer, on some unrecorded ground, which Hobhouse tells us nearly resulted in a duel. The friends left Malta on September 29th, in the war-ship "Spider," and after anchoring off Patras, and spending a few hours on shore, they skirted the coast of Acarnania, in view of localities-as Ithaca, the Leucadian rock, and Actium-whose classic memories filtered through the poet's mind and found a place in his masterpieces. Landing at Previsa, they started on a tour through Albania r "O'er many a mount sublime, Byron was deeply impressed by the beauty of the scenery, and the half-savage independence of the people, described as "always strutting about with slow dignity, though in rags.' In October we find him with his companions at Janina, hospitably entertained by order of Ali Pasha, the famous Albanian Turk, bandit, and despot, then engaged in besieging Ibrahim in Illyria. They proceeded on their way by "bleak Pindus," Acherusia's lake, and Zitza, with its monastery door battered by robbers. Before reaching the latter place they encountered a terrific thunder-storm, in the midst of which they separated, and Byron's detachment lost its way for nine hours, during which he composed the verses to Florence, quoted above. Some days later they together arrived at Tepelleni, and were there received by Ali Pasha in person. The scene on entering the town is described as recalling Scott's Branksome Castle and the feudal system; and the introduction to Ali, who sat for some of the traits of the poet's corsairs, is graphically reproduced in a letter to Mrs. Byron. "His first question was, why at so early an age I left my country, and without a 'lala,' or nurse? He then said the English minister had told him I was of a great family, and desired his respects to my mother, which I now present to you (date, November 12th). He said he was certain I was a man of birth, because I had small ears, curling hair, and little white hands. He told me to consider him as a father whilst I was in Turkey, and said he looked on me as his son. Indeed he treated me like a child, sending me almonds, fruit, and sweetmeats twenty times a day." Byron shortly afterwards discovered his host to be a poisoner and an assassin. "Two days ago," he proceeds, in a passage which illustrates his character and a common experience, "I was |