Of this ill-starred marriage the poet Byron was the fruit, in 1788, as has been said. He was therefore two years old when his parents removed to Aberdeen, and in that city the next eight years of his boyhood were spent. He was put to a day-school at the age of five, and even then betrayed an unusual fondness for historical reading. But neither here, nor afterwards at the Grammar School of Aberdeen, did he distinguish himself in school-work; he was usually far down in the class; and when Aberdonians in after years raked up their reminiscences of their noble school-fellow, it was as a leader in frolic and fight, not as a maker of Latin versions, that Byron stood forth.

Instances of generosity, boldness, and impotent rage, are cited out of Byron's boyhood: but anecdotes of this kind belong to the childhood of thousands who turn out most ordinary men. One only circumstance is characteristic enough to merit specification, and that is the profound impression made upon his heart, at eight years of age, by a Scotch lassie named Mary Duff. So long afterwards as 1813, when twenty-five years of age, he made this first attachment the theme of lengthened remark in his diary. He avers that the news of Mary Duff's marriage was "like a thunder-stroke, it nearly choked me, to the horror of my mother, and the astonishment and almost incredulity of everybody." Byron's precocity, therefore, was not intellectual, but emotional.

In 1796, which is also the date of this boyish attachment, Byron, on recovering from scarlet-fever, was removed, for the benefit of the country air, from Aberdeen to a farm-house near Ballater. The bed in which Byron slept is still shown in the farm-house, and a short walk brings the worshipper of genius to "Dark Lochnagar." The mountain scenery of other lands always recalled to him that of Scotland; and the recollected innocence and peace amid which he had viewed the latter, formed a chief element of his delight in contemplating the former. In "The Island," a poem written only a year or two before his death, he thus expounds his love of the most stupendous or most classic mountain scenes:

"But 'twas not all long ages' lore, nor all
Their nature, held me in their thrilling thrall
The infant rapture still survived the boy,
And Lochnagar with Ida looked o'er Troy."

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He sometimes disdains Scotland; but this was affectation. fond remembrance was the genuine tribute of his heart to the scenes and companions of his boyhood.

In 1798, by the death of his grand-uncle, the fifth Lord Byron, Mary Duff's sweetheart became all at once an English peer, and the delighted mother removed with her noble boy to Newstead Abbey, the family seat in Nottinghamshire. This was not only the turning-point in the fortunes of the future poet, but a circumstance of mighty influence on the development of his character. During the spring-time of life there is unrest and waywardness enough in most individuals of a race so vigorous as the British, and the necessity of daily labour, to win or to maintain one's position in society, is the fly-wheel graciously attached to the machinery of our powers, regulating all their movements, and turning to profitable account that energy which might otherwise have proved destructive. By his sudden elevation to wealth and rank, Byron

publication of his "English Bards and Scotch Reviewers," a satire as fierce, indiscriminate, and unprincipled as he afterwards himself declared it to be. On the first leaf of a copy, which he perused nine years afterwards abroad, the following has been found in his handwriting :-"The binding of this volume is considerably too valuable for its contents. Nothing but the consideration of its being the property of another prevents me from consigning this miserable record of misplaced anger and indiscriminate acrimony to the flames."

Some of Byron's eccentricities belonging to this period deserve to be mentioned. Thus, after reading the Edinburgh Review on the "Hours of Idleness," he is said to have drunk three bottles of claret at dinner; and he celebrated his coming of age in 1809 by dining on eggs and bacon, and a bottle of ale. This latter fact he himself records thirteen years afterwards, when writing from Geneva, and adds," but as neither of them agrees with me, I never use them but on great jubilees, once in four or five years or so." This recurrence after so long a date, to so trivial a circumstance, and the annotation of it, clearly betray an affectation of peculiarity, and a desire to be noticed and wondered at, tc which no other name than vanity can be given. There is every reason to believe that Byron said and did many things, and these not always innocent, for the express purpose of making people especially his own countrymen, stare. Did not vanity combine with incipient misanthropy in dictating the inscription over the tomb of his favourite dog Boatswain in the grounds of Newstead.

Byron was just twenty when this monument was erected; and the misanthropy of an English nobleman at that early age is on the first view surprising. In Byron's case, however, the explanation is at hand. Let a man be out of harmony with the social system into which he has been born, let him be prevented from expending on any object in heaven or on earth that power of love which nature gives in greater or less measure to us all, and let him lose even his own self-respect, then the most natural issue is misanthropy. These fatal data were already present in Byron. His scepticism brought him into discord with the institutions of his country, and deprived him, in his solitary musings, of man's "last appeal from fortune and from fate:" the Edinburgh Review had stung him into insurrection against the whole literary world, where, if anywhere, he might have expected to meet with kindred spirits his love had gone out to a worthy object, and had returned to his bosom with the poison of rejection and disdain filial piety offered him no refuge, for his mother had forfeited his respect by the vulgar extremes to which she went in her fits of passion, throw. ing even the poker at his head; nor could he dwell peacefully with his own thoughts, for there he was encountered by the fresh memory of his youthful excesses. Had Byron's spirit broken, one of two issues was before him,-either the paralysis of despair, or complete regeneration; but, as it resisted the pressure, nothing remained but to go out of himself in hate, and wage war with mankind. It is much to be regretted that Byron was taken by his peers just for what he was, or rather for what he gave himself out to be, which, by a strange perversity, was even worse than the reality. They all stood aloof, even his guardian Lord Carlisle; and when,