LORD BYRON I. LIFE GEORGE GORDON, afterward sixth Lord Byron, was born in Holles Street, London, January 22, 1788. His mother, Catherine Gordon, had become the second wife of John Byron, a handsome profligate who deserted her and her child, fled from his creditors, and died at Valenciennes in 1791. Till her son was ten years old, Mrs. Byron lived in Scotland, chiefly at Aberdeen, on a meagre income of £150 a year. But in 1798 the fifth Lord Byron died, -the boy's great-uncle, that "wicked lord" who was brother to the Admiral, "Foulweather Jack." At school roll-call, after the news arrived, the name of George Gordon was read out with "Dominus" before it, and the precocious little lame boy burst into tears, in some mingled and violent emotion. With his mother and the Scotch nurse who had taught him to read the Bible, the young Lord Byron soon journeyed south in a post-chaise, to live near Newstead Abbey, the family seat, then partly ruined, which Henry VIII granted to "little Sir John Byron of the great beard." Here they remained for a year. Their life together was never happy. "Byron," a schoolmate once said, "your mother is a fool!" And the poor child replied, tragically, "I know it!" By fits and starts Mrs. Byron was kind to him, but she had a stormy temper, hysterical and ungovernable, and by turns petted and beat him. Once at least she rushed at him with the poker, and Byron defended himself with the chairs. Later, at Southwell, mother and son each secretly warned an apothecary not to sell poison to the other, if it should be asked for. A violent pair, they lived in a tempest. Perhaps what hurt Byron most, his mother once called him a "lame brat.” Quietly, but with a terrible light in his eyes, he replied, "I was born so, mother!" He was born, indeed, with a deformity—a sort of club-foot-which throughout his life he hardly forgot for a moment. The defect appears not to have been greatly noticeable, but he brooded over it always: from the time when, on his nurse's knees, he cut with his baby's whip at a visitor who noticed his foot, crying, "Dinna speak of it!"—from his school days at Harrow, where cruel bullies put his lame foot into a bucket of water; from the days when he jealously watched his cousin, Mary Chaworth, dancing with other youths, to his last hours on his death-bed. His lameness cut him off from many games and exercises, but not all. At Harrow—where he stayed from 1801 to 1805, and where his head-master discovered talents which would "add lustre to his rank "—he not only led all the boys' rebellions, but fought the larger boys who tormented the smaller, and—lameness and all-won six battles out of seven. 66 Though later of a strikingly beautiful face and figure, he was at this time described by an acquaintance as a fat, bashful boy, with hair combed straight over his forehead, and looking a perfect gaby." He was conceited as well as shy, and not very popular among girls. We need not be surprised, therefore, that when, in his sixteenth year, he fell in love with his cousin, Mary Chaworth, she did not fall in love with him. She afterward married a commonplace squire named Musters, and married unhappily. For years Byron brooded over this disappointment, but most over an unintentionally cruel rebuke, when he heard Mary Chaworth say to her maid: "Do you think I could marry that lame boy?" 66 When Byron went up to Cambridge in 1805, you must picture him as a brilliant, vain, sensitive youngster, whom the gyp (the man that took care of his rooms) feared as a young man of tumultuous passions"; who made several sincere friends, Long, Harness, Matthews, Scrope Davies, and Hobhouse; who found Cambridge dull, and became a harum-scarum undergraduate, sometimes sitting up over champagne and claret till after midnight; who was a good cricketer, rider, boxer, could dive in the Cam and get coins fourteen feet deep, and was an expert shot. His pistols he carried everywhere and fired at all times and places,-alarming people, as he also alarmed them by keeping a tame bear, who, he said, was to “sit for a fellowship." Meantime he published in 1806 a volume of juvenile poems, and in 1807 his Hours of Idleness. In 1808, after three irregular years in which he had done everything but study, he |