Newstead, had decided to publish Childe Harold at his own expense in a handsome quarto edition. Byron grumbled. “A cursed unsaleable size; but it is pestilent long, and one must obey one's bookseller ". Dallas was to share the profits with Murray, and the agreement for the copyright was to depend on the success. (The copyright, it will be remembered, was Dallas's property.) After much discussion, Byron had consented to let his name appear. Gifford had been shown the MS.-to his adorer's violent indignation. He had pronounced it not only the best thing Byron had written, but equal to any of the present age; yet even this glory had not mollified the angry author. "I will be angry with Murray ", he had written. "It was a bookselling, back-shop, Paternoster-Row, paltry proceeding". "It is bad enough to be a scribbler, without having recourse to such shifts to extort praise, or deprecate censure. It is anticipating, it is begging, kneeling, adulating-the devil! the devil the devil! and all without my wish, and contrary to my express desire". "I have written to [Murray] as he never was written to before by an author, I'll be sworn ". Byron's fear was that Gifford should think it (from so publicly-professed an admirer) a hint to get a favourable review of the poem in the Quarterly. His anger seems nowadays out of all proportion to the offence; but evidently the " reader" was not then a recognised functionary.

Murray's indiscretion had at all events the good effect of bringing Byron to see that Dallas was wise in delaying the Hints from Horace. By this time it was generally known that he had a poem in the press, and Galt fancied that the many paragraphs which began to appear were inspired by him. On alluding to one of them, his suspicions were increased by Byron's embarrassment. "I mention this incident ", continues Galt, "not in the spirit of detraction . . . but as a tint of character, indicative of the appetite of distinction by which, about this period, he became so powerfully incited that at last it grew into a diseased crave". But he adds that at this time only the earliest symptoms were apparent: "the fears, the timidity, the bashfulness of young desire still clung to him, and he was throbbing with doubt if he should be found worthy of the high prize for which he was about to offer himself a candidate ".

He was found worthy. There never has been such a triumph, nor did anybody ever invent an apter phrase to define one.

1 Byron had expressly forbidden Murray to send the MS. to Gifford. "If it must needs be shown, send it to another. . . . He is the last man whose censure (however eager to avoid it) I would deprecate by clandestine means ". But, as we have seen (p. 128), Gifford was one of Murray's "readers". Byron evidently did not know this.

"I awoke one morning and found myself famous ". The morning was the 10th of March 1812.1 In three days an edition of five hundred copies was sold; and Murray then bought the copyright for £600.3

The book was, in our modern jargon, well-handled. The right people read the proofs and early copies, and talked about them in the right way; and Byron himself provided a brilliant advertisement. On February 27 he had delivered his maiden speech in the House of Lords, and it had been a success. Coming out, elated with many compliments, he encountered Dallas, who in the emotion of the moment held out his left hand, for his right clasped an umbrella. "What, give your friend your left hand on such an occasion !" The umbrella was displayed and suppressed; Byron was content, and gleefully assured the proprietor of Childe Harold that the début had been the best possible advertisement for the poetry.

His speech, not too well delivered-but better delivered than either of the succeeding ones-reads admirably. The debate was on the Nottingham Frame-breaking Bill. There was trouble in Nottingham. Trade was bad, the stocking-weavers had been losing work, and their discontent was increased by the introduction of machinery for the manufacture of gaiters and stockings. Employment, they supposed, would now decrease still further, and in the November of 1811 there had been serious riotinghouses broken into, stocking-frames destroyed. The military had been called out in force; by January 1812, the town was swarming with soldiers. A Bill was introduced in the Commons on February 14, increasing the severity of punishment for framebreaking. It passed its third reading on February 20, without a division. Lord Liverpool then introduced it into the House of Lords, and it was on the second reading (February 27, 1812) that Byron spoke against the Bill. He said of his performance, "I spoke very violent sentences with a sort of modest

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1 Moore (p. 157) implies that the date was February 29; and Dallas (Recollections, p. 220) says that he obtained a copy on Tuesday, March 3. But in the Times and the Morning Chronicle for March 5, future publica. tion" is announced; and advertisements in the Courier and the Morning Chronicle on Tuesday, March 10, announce "first appearance" (Poems, ii. xii.).

The whole sum fell to Dallas, who gives this account of the transaction with Byron. "After speaking of the sale, and settling the new edition, I said, 'How can I possibly think of this rapid sale, and the profits likely to ensue, without recollecting-' 'What?' 'Think what a sum your work may produce'. 'I shall be rejoiced, and wish it doubled and trebled; but do not talk to me of money. I never will receive money for my writings" (Recollections, p. 230).

• As introduced into the Lords, it rendered the offence of frame-breaking punishable by death.

impudence, abused everything and everybody, and put the Lord Chancellor very much out of humour ".

sentences.

There is a strong note of modernity in some of the violent "The police, however useless, were by no means idle several notorious delinquents had been detected-men, liable to conviction, on the clearest evidence, of the capital crime of poverty, men who had been nefariously guilty of lawfully begetting several children "-that "lawfully" is good! And in his denunciation of the course adopted in calling out the military, we seem to hear an echo before the time of comments now familiar to our ears. "I cannot see the policy of placing [the military] in situations where they can only be made ridiculous. As the sword is the worst argument that can be used, so it should be the last. In this instance it has been the first ". He went on to compare, to England's disadvantage, the state of England with the state of the most oppressed provinces in Turkey. "And what are your remedies! After months of inaction, and months of action worse than inactivity, at length comes forth the grand specific. . . . These convulsions must terminate in death.. Are there not capital punishments enough in your statutes? Will the famished wretch who has braved your bayonets be appalled by your gibbets? When death is a relief, and the only relief it appears that you will afford him, will he be dragooned into tranquillity? He begged them to consider longer, not to rush this measure through the Lords as it had been rushed through the Commons. "When a proposal is made to emancipate or relieve, you hesitate, you deliberate for years, you temporise and tamper with the minds of men; but a death-bill must be passed off-hand ". In peroration he drew a picture of an arrest -of one of the weavers dragged into Court to be tried for this new offence, under this new law; and cried, "There are two things wanting to condemn him, and these are, in my opinion, twelve butchers for a jury, and a Jeffreys for a judge. "1

It is not difficult to believe that a Tory Lord Chancellor may have been very much out of humour; nevertheless, our orator was warmly complimented by "divers persons ministerial -yea, ministerial!" while, on his own Whig side, Lords Holland and Grenville were enthusiastic. The former said he would beat them all if he persevered; and the latter, that he was very like Burke.

My delivery", he told Hodgson, "[was] loud and fluent enough, perhaps a little theatrical". He suffered from the Harrow sing-song-" the same chanting tone", says Moore, 'that disfigured his recitation of poetry . . . encroaching just

1 The Bill passed its third reading on March 5, and became law as 52 George III. c. 16.

enough on the boundaries of song to offend those ears most by which song is best enjoyed and understood." This defect was so marked in his second and third essays 1 as to make them more or less actual failures; yet it is recorded that Sheridan urged him to take up the career of an orator. But it never was my turn of inclination to try ", he confesses. Elze attributes this to mental indolence, saying that to become an orator he must have worked hard, while in poetry he could gratify his love of fame with the least expenditure of toil. The reproach refutes itself by the very measure of truth which it possesses. Men inevitably, and fortunately, turn to the thing in which they are so gifted that it comes easily; otherwise, we should behold a world of comic opera, wherein everybody pursued the aim which foredoomed him to failure. But indeed the simple explanation of Byron's choice is given by himself in the Detached Thoughts. Just after [my first speech], my poem of Childe Harold was published, and nobody ever thought about my prose afterwards, nor indeed did I".

When Moore and Byron first met, the latter was still in that state of isolation which had long been familiar to him. The coffee-house companions whom he had picked up before his absence from England, were either relinquished or dispersed ; he had but the three or four college-chums, the fussy Dallas, and the precarious Hanson (liable at any moment to annoy him, as men of law must do, by delay or conscientiousness), whom he could call his friends. It is not a tragic picture, as Galt very sanely says; but it is an arresting one. Lordlings are not often solitaries by compulsion; and Byron, moody and difficult though he was, was never the true solitary by election. He liked, more than most, somebody to whom he might not only say, "How sweet is solitude!" but "How interesting of me to prefer it to society!" With the new intimacy-the Moore intimacy-there arrived, true to the law by which neither misfortunes nor joys come single, the opening for another. Rogers was a frequenter of Holland House, and Byron's projected débût in the Lords was spoken of by him in that high

1 His second speech (April 21, 1812) was in support of Lord Donoughmore's motion for a Committee on the Roman Catholic claims; his third, in the Debate on Major Cartwright's Petition (June 1, 1813) with respect to circumstances at Huddersfield in January, 1813, in which Major Cartwright was involved. Moore relates that on Byron's return from the House he walked up and down the room, spouting his sentences in a mock-heroic voice. I told them that it was a flagrant violation of the Constitution ", etc. "But what was this dreadful grievance ?" asked Moore. "The grievance?" repeated Byron, pausing as if to consider. "Oh, that I forget ".

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political and literary sphere. The topic interested Lord Holland, for he was then Recorder of Nottingham, and he intended, like Byron, to oppose the Bill. Only one thing stood between them: the offensive lines on him and Lady Holland in English Bards and Scotch Reviewers. It would be difficult for one who had written as Byron had of the hospitalities of their table to be offered, or to accept, them. Of that peer whose exquisite temper so affected all who knew him-Brougham, writing of its irresistible charm, said that in his "whole experience of our race, he never saw such a temper, or anything that at all resembled it " ;" few more characteristic traits are recorded than the manner in which he solved this problem. Lord Holland, a distinguished man of nearly forty, allowed himself to be brought to the lodgings of the then almost wholly obscure youth of twenty-three, and there and thus introduced to him. Dallas was present, and thought it a curious event. His jealousy, always acute and now growing ever acuter, prevented him, one surmises, from seeing or saying that it was something more than that. Byron was "evidently awkward"; no one else showed any embarrassment at all. And so an intercourse began which was to continue in the same sense of frequent kindness from Lord Holland, and warm, remorseful gratitude from Byron, culminating in the suppression, then and for ever, so far as the author was concerned, of the fifth (and every previous) edition of English Bards. Directly Childe Harold appeared, Byron sent a copy to Holland House, and alluded shyly but feelingly to the magnanimity which had been shown him, quoting (the error is, in him, worth recording) a line of Dryden's as one of Pope's. Soon afterwards he became an intimate at the house; soon afterwards, for that matter, an intimate at any house he chose. "Splendid crowds courted his society "—and no wonder; for to read a work of genius, see the author, and see him the dazzling, perplexing, fascinating thing that Byron was, might turn steadier heads than those of "that sex, whose weakness it is" (I will not dispute it let Moore speak for the women of his day) " to be most easily won by those who come recommended by the greatest number of triumphs over others ".

For, of course, the splendid crowds were led by the women, commandeered by the women. . . and is it not an occasion for amused conjecture to remember, for an instant, the other men? How did they like it?