passion with the idyll of Little Veronica. Like Byron, Heine never forgot his childish love; but, unlike Byron, he beheld her die while she was still a child. Hazel-eyed Mary Duff married, at eighteen, an eminent wine-merchant 1; and it is Byron's narrative of his reception of that news which makes the episode so singularly differ from other records of precocious passion. When he was sixteen (1804) his mother one day told him that she had had a letter from Edinburgh saying that his old sweetheart, Mary Duff, was married. "And what was my answer? I really cannot explain or account for my feelings at that moment; but they nearly threw me into convulsions, and alarmed my mother so much that, after I grew better, she generally avoided the subject to me-and contented herself with telling all her acquaintance. We were both the merest children. I had and have been attached fifty times since that period; yet I recollect all we said to each other, all our caresses, her features, my restlessness, sleeplessness, my tormenting my mother's maid to write for me to her, which she at last did, to quiet me.. I remember, too, our walks, and the happiness of sitting by Mary, in the children's apartment, at their house not far from the Plain-stones at Aberdeen, while her lesser sister Helen played with the doll, and we sat gravely making love, in our way.

"How the deuce did all this occur so early? where could it originate? I certainly had no sexual ideas for years afterwards; and yet my misery, my love for that girl were so violent that I sometimes doubt if I have ever been really attached since.... Hearing of her marriage . . . was like a thunderstroke-it nearly choked me to the horror of my mother and the astonishment and almost incredulity of everybody. . . How very pretty is the perfect image of her in my memoryher brown, dark hair, and hazel eyes; her very dress! I should be quite grieved to see her now; the reality, however beautiful, would destroy, or at least confuse, the features of the lovely Peri which then existed in her, and still lives in my imagination, at the distance of more than sixteen years

Again, in 1815, writing to one Mrs. Hay, a cousin of Mary, he says, I never forgot her, and never can. I have the most perfect idea of her as a child"; and a year later Major Pryse Lockhart Gordon heard the same confidence. met at the dancing-school", added Byron-and most of us have pirouetted through a similar idyll.

"We

What the episode demonstrates, then, is not so much unusual precocity of feeling, as unusual violence in the expression of that

1 Mr. Robert Cockburn, of Edinburgh and London. There is a long reference to Mary Duff in Ruskin's Præterita, i. 169.

2 P. L. Gordon, Personal Memoirs, ii. 321-22.

instinctive masculine egotism which revolts at the capture by another of the once desired woman. Most boys of sixteen would have felt and looked for the moment mortified; Byron was "thrown nearly into convulsions". His sensibility was at any time excessive; we shall see that, at this time, he was in the throes of Mary Chaworth's rejection of him for John Musters. Now here was another beloved Mary, and another proof that he could be forgotten. With remembrance of our own young vanities and their frequent wounds, even feminine readers will refuse to wonder with him over the intensity of his childish love. Not that was wonderful-but the intensity of his vanity, and of his generic masculine egotism.

In 1794 he had become heir to the title. In May 1798, his grand-uncle died at Newstead Abbey, and he became George Gordon, sixth Lord Byron.

CHAPTER II

EARLY BOYHOOD-1798-1801

The Chaworth Duel-Byron's inheritance-Rochdale and Newstead Abbey-Arrival at Newstead-May Gray-Nottingham: Lavender and Rogers-Move to London-Care of the twisted foot-Dr. Glennie of Dulwich-Mrs. Byron's character-The first dash into poetry-Margaret Parker

H

E ran up to his mother on the day after his accession to the peerage and asked her if she saw any difference in him since he had been made a lord, for he could see none himself. But he was soon to feel acutely one difference. On the morning that his name was first called at the Grammar School with the title of dominus attached, he found himself so pierced by emotion as to be unable to give the "adsum ". The round-eyed amazement of his schoolfellows added to the drama; speechless still, the small Baron at last burst into tears. In its intensity, and its departure from the national ideal in such matters, this (like many other things that he did) is a complete epitome of his relations with "the world".

No communication of any kind had been held with the former lord, who on the few occasions of mentioning his heir at all would speak of him as "the little boy at Aberdeen ". Acquaintance with William, fifth Baron Byron, would, however, have afforded scant enjoyment to any one. He had lived under a cloud since the notorious Chaworth Duel in 1765; and the cloud was not only black, but charged with the lightning of every kind of scandal. His wife 1 had been unable to live with him; and however exaggerated the tales of his brutalities to her (they were still current in the neighbourhood in 1830) there must have been some foundation of misery on which to build them. "He had thrown her into the pond at Newstead"; "he had shot his coachman in a fit of fury, flung the body into the carriage where his wife sat alone; then had mounted the box and driven her for miles through the darkness in that companionship' These things are not to be believed; but about what type of

1 She was the daughter and heiress of Mr. Charles Shaw, of Besthorpe Hall, Norfolk. She married him in 1747, and died in 1788, the year of our Byron's birth.

man are they invented? Something gives rise to the fell imaginings; it may be excusable when all is known; but it is there. The Calumniated Angel is a myth.

The Chaworth Duel had been more or less forced upon him. Mr. Chaworth 1 was a fire-eater; and the subject of their quarrel was one which has ever, in the hearts of country gentlemen, aroused strong passions—namely, the preservation of game. Chaworth was of the most stringent severity for poachers; Lord Byron (very characteristically) maintained that the way to have game was not to preserve at all. It came to a wager; Chaworth declared that he had more birds on five acres than his neighbour on all his estates, and Lord Byron proposed a bet of one hundred guineas. A third person intervened: "such a bet could never be decided"; and the conversation seemed to diverge. But Chaworth soon broke out again, and this time, instead of a wager, it was a challenge. He then left the room much excited. "Had he been hasty ?" he demanded of a friend, and seemed uneasy; but Lord Byron had followed. The angry men ordered a waiter-the quarrel took place on the occasion of the Notts Club Dinner at the Star and Garter Tavern, Pall Mall-to show them to an empty room. He did so, and placed on the table one small tallow candle. By this light they fought, with swords. In a few minutes the bell rang; the waiter entered, and found Mr. Chaworth supported in Lord Byron's arms, and mortally wounded. Chaworth had made the first pass, through his opponent's waistcoat, and thought he had killed him; but while he was asking the peer if he were in truth so sorely hurt, "Lord Byron shortened his sword, and stabbed him in the belly". Chaworth was carried to his own house, where he died, lamenting his folly in fighting in the dark, for that was what had led to his mistake: his sword, instead of being in Lord Byron's breast, had been merely entangled in the waistcoat. Lord Byron was tried by his peers at Westminster Hall in April of the same year, and found guilty of manslaughter 3; but by an old statute ordaining that "in all cases where clergy are allowed, a Peer is to be dismissed without burning in the hand, loss of inheritance, or corruption of blood", this Peer escaped all punishment, and was immediately dismissed "on paying his fees ".

Such is one version of the famous Chaworth Duel, over which 1 He was the great-grandson of George Chaworth, created (1627) Viscount Chaworth of Armagh, whose daughter Elizabeth married William, third Lord Byron, grandfather of the Wicked Lord. See note at end of chapter with reference to the Duel.

On January 26, 1765.

• The coroner's jury had given a verdict of wilful murder. Lord Byron was consequently imprisoned in the Tower.

the slayer's grand-nephew was to ponder so moodily when, in process of time, he fell in love with the victim's grand-niece.

William, fifth lord, called by the country-folk The Wicked, lived thenceforth in utter seclusion for twenty-four years.1 He always went armed; and when, by a particular exception, an old friend once dined with him, a case of pistols was placed on the table, as if it were part of the dinner-service and as probably to be used. He kept but two servants: old Joe Murray, afterwards to be the favourite of our sixth lord; and a woman who was dubbed by the neighbourhood Lady Betty-a nickname obvious in its implication. The only other inmates of Newstead Abbey were a colony of crickets, which he spent much time in feeding and training. They did come to know his voice, and would even obey his call; and our Byron used to relate, on the authority of Joe Murray and Lady Betty, that on the day of the fifth lord's death the crickets left the house in a body and in such numbers that "you could not cross the hall without treading on them ". To such a being did the boy succeed-and to what inheritance? To an inheritance which had been deliberately ruined for revenge upon an only son. The grounds and house of Newstead had been allowed to fall into helpless decay; five thousand pounds' worth of oaks had been cut down (for the old lord, despite his sordid way of life, had the family knack of impecuniosity); worst of all, the Lancashire estate of Rochdale had been sold and sold illegally, both sellers and buyers being perfectly aware of the inability to make out a title. But Lord Byron did not care, and the purchasers shrewdly calculated that by the time the tort could be set aside, they would have indemnified themselves for any pecuniary loss which their dispossession might then bring about. For Rochdale was very rich in coal.

2

1 ་་ When compelled by business to go to London, he travelled as Mr. Waters" (Dallas, Recollections, etc., 1824).

"

• One splendid oak, known as the Pilgrim's, which stood and stands near the north lodge of the park, was bought in by the neighbouring gentry and made over to the estate. Perhaps " (says Mr. E. H. Coleridge, Poems, vi. 497)" by the Druid oak [in Don Juan, xiii. 56] Byron meant to celebrate this last of the clan', which, in his day, before the woods were replanted, must have stood out in solitary grandeur".

"

Sir John and all

• The Rochdale estate had been in the Byron family since the time of Edward I. When Sir John Byron was, under Charles I (1643), raised to the peerage, he was entitled Baron Byron of Rochdale in the county of Lancaster. He had been a devoted partisan of the King. Biron," says the writer of Colonel Hutchinson's Memoirs, his brothers, bred up in arms, and valiant men in their own persons, were all passionately the King's." Seven brothers of the family, indeed, had fought at Edgehill. Newstead was besieged by the Parliamentarians; at Charles I's death, the Parliament sequestered the Byron estates, but they were restored immediately on the accession of Charles II.