every exertion on my part to make him better"; "I cannot help lamenting he has so little sense of the Benefit he has already received as to be so apparently neglectful "-for in the second letter, written on October 2, 1802, Laurie had to complain that the boy (who was then at Harrow) had spent several days in London without seeing him. This was the last attempt made at a cure; but Sheldrake, in later years, contrived a sort of shoe which did away with the worst inconveniences.

While the two surgeons were tending the foot, Dr. Glennie of Dulwich was doing his best to develop the head. In the Lordship Lane of that pretty suburb stood the private school of this first serious teacher of Byron, who was to be the first also to form any well-considered view of his character. But Glennie was in addition to learn the full force of Mrs. Byron's. Everything that he thought desirable she opposed; she interfered with his instruction, and when the master tried to stop the foolish system of Saturday-to-Monday sojourns in London, Mrs. Byron retorted by making them into weeks instead of week-ends. With any tolerable opportunity, Glennie could have done much; as things were, he could do almost nothing. Nor did even the injunctions of Lord Carlisle,1 the boy's guardian, avail to influence Mrs. Byron. To every remonstrance from the master she would reply by one of her paroxysms of passion, and these, unlike her son's rages, were audible over the whole school. Glennie overheard one day a painful morsel of dialogue. One of the boy's companions bluntly came out with: "Byron, your mother is a fool”. “I know it ", he answered gloomily, not knowing to what a degree the worse than folly was to injure him in later life. For Lord Carlisle was soon irretrievably alienated. He ceased to have any intercourse with his ward's mother, and when Glennie once again implored his intervention, he replied, "I can have nothing more to do with Mrs. Byron. You must manage her as you can ". No one had ever succeeded in managing her, and Glennie failed with the rest. . . . Natures like hers make the constant problem of the observer. She had a warm heart, courage, generosity, some shrewdness, and a crazy kind of devotion. Yet she made the misery, and might easily have made the ruin, of her only child. What practical care, after all, had she ever given him? None in his babyhood where was the mother on all those haunted nights in Aberdeen? None, or far too little, in his physical distress, or Lavender's peer beer-boy could not have been the common gapeseed of St. James's Lane in Nottingham. None, and worse than none, in his first really vital contact with the 1 He was the son of Isabella Byron, daughter of the fourth Lord Byron, by her marriage with the fourth Earl of Carlisle.

outer world, or Glennie would have been permitted to do what he could, and the guardian, influential and prepared at least for duty-kindness, would not have been fatally estranged. It would have been better for Byron, as Elze comments, to be a "double" orphan. No relative could have proved a more infelicitous guardian than his mother proved. Her sudden gusts of maudlin tenderness (in which his eyes were pronounced to be as beautiful as his father's) became, we may well suppose, as abhorrent as her gusts of loud-mouthed fury-and yet the boy was warm-hearted, generous, kind. As he grew up, he was forced into deception that she might not haunt and disgrace him; he wrote to her, when he did write (but it is remarkable how dutiful he was in that respect), with frequent cold rejection of advances which would end, as he knew, in only one way. His deep and bitter suffering shows itself in various forms throughout his letters to the one woman who did, for a time, retain him by the proverbial silken thread—his half-sister, Augusta Leigh, then Augusta Byron. But what profound, what inexpressive, anguish lay beneath the brilliant mockery, and the stinging satire, and the outraged accusations of destiny, only those whose experience has been similar can in any degree compute. No pain is like it, since (as he was himself to cry when she lay dead-and what must not the words have carried beyond the hackneyed surface pathos ?) "We have only one mother."

The year 1800 is a notable one to Byron's biographer, for in it he made his "first dash into poetry ". This adventure was in honour of his second first love-if one may use a term which occupation with his early history soon makes indispensable. The result of the dash has perished, but the name of its victim remains. She was his first cousin, Margaret Parker,1 "one of the most beautiful of evanescent beings". Few girls, indeed, have left a more exquisite memory in a lover's heart. "She looked as if she had been made of a rainbow, all beauty and peace So he wrote in a diary of 1821. Margaret died at fifteen of consumption, two years after their meeting; and Augusta Byron went to see her shortly before the end. Augusta happened casually to mention his name. He knew nothing of Margaret's illness ("being at Harrow and in the country at the time "); it was plainly not a continued episode—but as the sister spoke, the girl's shadowed face flushed into vivid, lovely colour to the very eyelids. No wonder that he never forgot her! But the elegiac verses which he wrote in 1802, the year of her death

1 Charlotte Augusta, daughter of Admiral, and sister of Captain "Jack", Byron, married Christopher Parker, son of Admiral of the Fleet Sir Peter Parker, Bart.; and this Margaret was her daughter.

(though he, in the diary, says " Some years after "), are deplorable. Frigidly correct in such technique and such sentiment as they aspire to, they are the one dull element in an idyll as transparent in its beauty as the memory she left behind.

NOTE ON THE CHAWORTH DUEL

"The Coroner's jury brought in a verdict of Wilful Murder, and on the presentation of their testimony to the House of Lords, Byron pleaded for a trial by God and his peers,' whereupon he was arrested and sent to the Tower. The case was tried by the Lords Temporal (the Lords Spiritual asked permission to withdraw), and after a defence had been read by the prisoner, 119 peers brought in a verdict of 'Not guilty of murder; guilty of manslaughter, on my honour'. Four peers only returned a verdict of Not guilty'. The result of the verdict was that Lord Byron claimed the benefit of the statute of Edward VI, and was discharged on paying the fees.

The defence... is able and convincing . . . the accused contrived to throw the onus of criminality upon his antagonist. It was Mr. Chaworth who began the quarrel . . . it was he who insisted on an interview, not on the stairs but in a private room, who locked the door, and whose demeanour made a challenge' to draw' inevitable ... Lord Byron came to close quarters with his adversary, and as he supposed, gave the unlucky wound which he would ever reflect upon with the utmost regret (Poems, iv. note to p. 542).

The poet, in his famous letter to Coulmann of 1823, said that so far from feeling any remorse for having killed Mr. Chaworth, who was a fire-eater (spadassin). . . his grand-uncle “always kept the sword

in his bed-chamber, where it still was when he died" (Elze, Life of Byron, Authorised translation, 1872, Appendix, p. 445).

CHAPTER III
HARROW-1801-1805

Dr. Drury of Harrow-Lord Carlisle-Friendships: Clare, Delawarr, Wingfield, Long-Intellectual development-Oratory-First lettersTurbulence at Harrow-The quarrel with Dr. Butler-End of schooldays

H

E had been two years with Dr. Glennie when Mrs. Byron finally flamed forth. She declared herself dissatisfied with his progress: he must go to a public school. Lord Carlisle was appealed to, and, remembering former encounters, he hastily acquiesced. And so, at thirteen (April 1801), the boy entered at last upon the manner of life which properly belonged to his rank, and entered upon it dispossessed of every advantage-for, peer of the realm i though he was, he came (and his schoolfellows knew he came) from social circles wholly undistinguished, with a fortune that corresponded in no way to his title, and, despite a rich store of odd general knowledge, as half-baked in the formal school education as he was in everything else. When to all this is added his lameness, we can figure to ourselves the state of mind which made him write in later life: "I always hated Harrow till the last year and a half ".

John Hanson, on bringing him to the school, had warned the Head Master, Dr. Joseph Drury, that his education had been much neglected, but "thought there was a cleverness about him." Drury was at once convinced not only of that "there was mind in his eye"-but of something far more valid for the boy's immediate happiness. He perceived that it was a wild mountain-colt that Hanson had left behind, but the colt, he thought, was "to be led by a silken string rather than by a cable "-and he obeyed the intuition. Wisest of his indulgences was that for the supersensitive vanity which was so marked a trait in Byron. The new boy, hearing from a comrade that many younger than himself were immensely more advanced in learning, fell into a mood of deep dejection. He would be placed in a class below these juniors-he would be

1 At Dulwich School he had been nicknamed the Old English Baron from his "frequent boast of the superiority of an old English Barony over later creations": a kind of vapouring soon cut short at Harrow.

humbled and degraded-everything would be hopeless! Drury divined the apprehensive misery, and promised him that he should not be placed at all until it could be with boys of his own age. From that moment he revived, and soon his shyness (he suffered much through life from shyness) began to give way. The master kept a discreet look-out, and found some of his first impressions confirming themselves. When, not long afterwards, Lord Carlisle expressed a wish to see him, Drury hastened up to London. Carlisle was anxious to discuss future prospects, and to hear his view of the boy's abilities. "He will never be a rich man," said the guardian. Drury made no comment on that, but remarked with emphasis, " He has talents, my lord, which will add lustre to his rank."

Lord Carlisle raised his eyebrows. "Indeed!" said he coldly; and Drury, with some repugnance, felt that he would rather have been told of mediocrity in mind as well as in fortune.

The truth was that Mrs. Byron had left an indelible impression on Frederick Howard, Earl of Carlisle-at one time among the most prodigious dandies of his period, and now a perfect type of the reformed rake. He desired to be kind; but to like the son of such a woman, even to wish him well in any but the most conventional sense, was more than he could achieve. And probably he had disturbing memories of his own mother -that Isabella Byron (sister of the notorious fifth lord) whom Fox had satirised as "a recluse in pride and rags", and who, when her eldest son was ten years old, had taken for second husband a mere baronet. Isabella was, indeed, of the pure Byron tradition. She wrote Maxims for Young Ladies, and she also wrote an answer to one Mrs. Greville's Ode on Indifference. The answer contained two stanzas which most of her near relatives might have signed :

"Let me drink deep the dang'rous cup

In hopes the prize to gain,

Nor tamely give the pleasure up,

For fear to share the pain.

Give me, whatever I possess,

To know and feel it all;

When youth and love no more may bless,
Let death obey my call."'

By the time her son comes on the stage of our story, he had been thoroughly sobered by much public office-Treasurer of the Household, Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, and so forth. He was also a renowned collector of pictures and statuary, and a poet to the extent of writing and publishing an enormous quan

1 This was Sir William Musgrave, of Heaton Castle, Cumberland. a L. and J., I. 36.