mortification to him; it soured his temper and has been truly described as the original misfortune of his life. Mrs. Byron settled at Nottingham, where Byron was placed under a tutor. His lameness received painful mistreatment at the hands of a quack bone-setter named Lavender. Mrs. Byron's constant attention to Byron's lameness, when he was a little boy, must have helped to fasten the consciousness of his bodily defect upon his mind.

In the summer of 1799, Mrs. Byron, having received a pension of £300 on the civil list, moved to London, where Byron's lameness was rationally treated by Dr. Baillie, and he was put to school to Dr. Glennie at Dulwich. It is recorded that he slept in the doctor's study and read many of the books he found there, including the English poets from Chaucer to Churchill. He did well under Dr. Glennie, who says that Byron entered upon his tasks "with alacrity and success," that he was "playful, goodhumored, and beloved by his companions."

Mrs. Byron interfered with his schooling a good deal, and, finally, in 1801, had him removed to Harrow, where he remained until 1805. His letters and journals give many interesting glimpses of his school days there. "I always hated Harrow till the last year and a half, but then I liked it," he says in one place; and in another, "I was a most unpopular boy, but led latterly." He seems to have gone in for swimming, boxing, shooting, and other athletic sports. He was a good batsman at cricket, though, it is said, he was under the necessity of having another boy run for him. He did his share of the fighting prescribed by custom in the English public schools, and it is probably true that, as a junior, he was resentful and rebellious; but, as a senior, his good nature had a chance to assert itself and he became popular.

Before Byron left Harrow, he had fallen in love with his cousin Mary Anne Chaworth, an heiress of Annesley in Nottinghamshire. He was rejected, being then fifteen years old; but it must not be thought, on account of his youth, that it did not cause him deep suffering. To him all blows of fortune were profound and powerful experi

ences.

Byron was at Trinity College, Cambridge, from October, 1805, to May, 1806, and again from May, 1807, to May, 1808. He took his honorary (nobleman's) M. A., as a matter of form, in July, 1808. He did little at Cambridge to improve his scholarship, but continued his reading in fiction and history. Miscellaneous reading is not accounted a virtue at the English universities, nor is the writing of poetry, which he also practiced to a considerable extent. There were during the period no less than four different volumes of Byron's juvenilia printed by S. & J. Ridge of Newark, all containing mainly the same poems. The third was the famous Hours of Idleness, published in the summer of 1807. Byron continued his swimming, pugilism, and other athletics; but he also kept fast company and lived beyond his means, so that he thinks, in a letter of 1808, that he will be £9,000 or £10,000 in debt on coming of age. The best thing about his college course was the friends he made. Indeed, during his whole life, he possessed the ability to gain the friendship of strong men. At Cambridge his best friends were Charles Skinner Matthews, Edward Noel Long, Francis Hodgson, and, most important of all, his life long friend John Cam Hobhouse, afterwards Lord Broughton. Hobhouse accounts for Byron's personal attraction in some measure when he speaks of "the entire self-abandonment, the incautious, it may be said, the dangerous sincerity of his private conver

sation," and says that the affection felt for him by his friends was "as that for a favorite and sometimes froward sister."

The Hours of Idleness was severely criticised in the Edinburgh Review for January, 1808; so severely and in so mean a spirit that Byron's pride was sorely wounded. He set to work in calm fury to prepare an answer to his enemies. He had on his desk 380 lines of a satire on "British Bards." These were rimed couplets in the satirical style introduced by Dryden and Pope and continued by Churchill, Gifford, and others nearer Byron's own times. Byron proceeded to revise and enlarge this work; it was rare at any time in his life that he worked with so much attention to details. He added passages of vigorous abuse for the reviewers, a thing which was just enough; but he did wrong when he retained passages heaping scorn upon all the leading poets of the day, except Campbell, Crabbe, and Rogers. The poets he attacked most severely, Scott, Southey, Wordsworth, and Coleridge, had done him no harm, and were, moreover, romanticists, men of his own school of poetry. Byron's sympathies and poetic theories were all with Pope and his followers, the socalled classicists, but nearly all of his subsequent practice and greatness is romantic rather than classic; that is, it is like the work of Scott and Wordsworth, rather than like that of Pope and Dryden. English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, which was the name of Byron's poem, was very popular and soon ran through five editions. A young lord who showed fight was an attractive figure. Hours of Idleness was melancholy, egotistical, fairly good school-boy poetry, nothing more; but Byron had struck a manly blow in his own defence against the unknown reviewer of the "blunt tomahawk" school, and the world applauded him.

Meantime, he had taken his seat in the House of Lords, had entertained a gay party at Newstead on the occasion of his coming of age; and was now preparing to make his "grand tour." The regulation journey through the Rhinelands, France, Switzerland, and Italy was impossible on account of the Napoleonic wars; and Byron therefore went to Portugal, Spain, Greece, and Turkey. At the end of June, 1809, he sailed from Falmouth in company with his friend Hobhouse. His prophecy as to his indebtedness on coming of age had been more than fulfilled, and his income did not amount to the interest on his debts; but there was no evidence of economy in the circumstances of his journey. He had a retinue of servants, and he was advancing Hobhouse's expenses. His financial provision, however, was inadequate, and it was lack of funds which finally cut his pilgrimage short. He had hoped to visit Egypt, Persia, and India.

The journey through Portugal and south-western Spain forms the basis of the first canto of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage; and subsequent travels in Greece and Turkey, of the second canto. He sailed home from Athens in the summer of 1811 and landed at Portsmouth, having been away from home two years and three weeks. Soon after his return, but before he saw her, his mother died, and several of his friends died about this time. He was also heavily in debt and without immediate prospects, so that it was for him a period of gloom.

Byron brought back with him another satire, Hints from Horace, a sequel to English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, and was with difficulty persuaded to set it aside and publish instead "a lot of Spenserian stanzas," of which he apparently did not think very highly. The work in Spenserian stanzas, the first two cantos of Childe Harold's

Pilgrimage, was published on leapyear's day, 1812; and Byron, to use his own now hackneyed words, "awoke one morning to find himself famous." He became at once a social lion, the "world's new joy." The book with its picturesque history, its great names and deeds, its fine descriptions of landscape, its fiery earnestness in behalf of liberty and justice, and, it must also be added, its brilliant superficiality of style and substance, was well suited to the age, and sold rapidly. Byron did not, however, accept any money for it, as at that time he considered it beneath the dignity of a peer of the realm to earn money by his pen. Later on, after he left England, he changed his views on this matter, and, according to his publisher, Murray, drove hard bargains for his copyrights. He was, by that time, cultivating "the good old-gentlemanly vice of avarice."

The three years following the publication of Childe Harold form the second period of Byron's authorship. The principal production was a series of rimed romances following the style begun by Coleridge in Christabel and made popular by Scott in the Lay of the Last Minstrel, Marmion, and The Lady of the Lake. In 1813 and 1814 appeared The Giaour, The Bride of Abydos, The Corsair, and Lara. "Lara I wrote," he says, "while undressing after coming home from balls and masquerades, in the year of revelry 1814. The Bride was written in four, The Corsair in ten days." The Siege of Corinth and Parisina followed in 1815. This flood of popular romances is represented in our book by Mazeppa, which, though composed in Venice in 1818, is a reversion to the earlier manner. It is his best achievment in the style of Scott except, perhaps, the familiar and beautiful Prisoner of Chillon, also printed here, composed in Switzerland in