pleasure. When one gets into a mill stream, it is difficult to swim against it, and keep out of the wheels. The consequences of being carried down by it would furnish an excellent lesson for youth. You are too old to profit by it. But, who ever profited by the experience of others, or his own? When you read my Memoirs, you will learn the evils, moral and physical, of true dissipation. I assure you my life is very entertaining, and very instructive."

I said, "I suppose, when you left England, you were a Childe Harold, and at Venice a Don Giovanni, and Fletcher your Leporello." He laughed at the remark. I asked him, in what way his life would prove a good lesson? and he gave me several anecdotes of himself, which I have thrown into a sort of narrative.

"Almost all the friends of my youth are dead; either shot in duels, ruined, or in the galleys :" (mentioning the names of several.)

"Among those I lost in the early part of my career, was Lord Falkland,-poor fellow! our fathers' fathers were friends. He lost his life for a joke, and one too he did not make himself. The present race is more steady than the last. They have less constitution and not so much money-that accounts for the change in their morals.

"I am now tamed; but before I married, showed some of the blood of my ancestors. It is ridiculous to say that we do not inherit our passions, as well as the gout, or any other disorder.

"I was not so young when my father died, but that

I perfectly remembered him; and had very early a horror of matrimony, from the sight of domestic broils: this feeling came over me very strongly at my wedding. Something whispered me that I was sealing my own death-warrant. I am a great believer in presentiments. Socrates' dæmon was no fiction. Monk Lewis had his monitor, and Napoleon many warnings. At the last moment I would have retreated, if I could have done so. I called to mind a friend of mine, who had married a young, beautiful, and rich girl, and yet was miserable. He had strongly urged me against putting my neck in the same yoke and to show you how firmly I was resolved to attend to his advice, I betted Hay fifty guineas to one, that I should always remain single. Six years afterwards I sent him the money. The day before I proposed to Lady Byron, I had no idea of doing so."

After this digression, he continued:

"I lost my father when I was only six years of age. My mother, when she was in a rage with me, (and I gave her cause enough,) used to say, 'Ah, you little dog, you are a Byron all over; you are as bad as your father!' It was very different from Mrs. Malaprop's saying, Ah! good dear Mr. Malaprop, I never loved him till he was dead.' But, in

fact, my father was, in his youth, any thing but a

Colebs in search of a wife.'

a bad hero for Hannah More.

He would have made

He ran out three for

tunes, and married or ran away with three women, and once wanted a guinea, that he wrote for; I have the note. He seemed born for his own ruin, and that of the other sex. He began by seducing Lady Car

marthen, and spent for her 40007. a-year; and not content with one adventure of this kind, afterwards eloped with Miss Gordon. His marriage was not destined to be a very fortunate one either, and I don't wonder at her differing from Sheridan's widow in the play. They certainly could not have claimed the flitch.

"The phrenologists tell me that other lines besides that of thought, (the middle of three horizontal lines on his forehead, on which he prided himself,) are strongly developed in the hinder part of my cranium; particularly that called philoprogenitiveness.* suppose, too, the pugnacious bump might be found somewhere, because my uncle had it.

I

"You have heard the unfortunate story of his duel with his relation and neighbour. After that melancholy event, he shut himself up at Newstead, and was in the habit of feeding crickets, which were his only companions. He had made them so tame as to crawl over him, and used to whip them with a whisp of straw, if too familiar. When he died, tradition says that they left the house in a body. I suppose I derive my superstition from this branch of the family; but though I attend to none of these new-fangled theories, I am inclined to think that there is more in a chart of the skull than the Edinburgh Reviewers suppose.† However that may be, I was a wayward youth, and gave my mother a world of trouble-as I fear Ada will her's, for I am told she is a little termagant. I

* He appears to have mistaken the meaning of this word in the vocabulary of the Craniologists, as in Don Juan.

+He had probably been reading the article on Gall and Spurzheim.

had an ancestor, too, that expired laughing, (I suppose that my good spirits came from him,) and two whose affection was such for each other, that they died almost at the same moment. There seems to have been a flaw in my escutcheon there, or that loving couple have monopolized all the connubial bliss of the family.

1

"I passed my boyhood at Marlodge, near Aberdeen, occasionally visiting the Highlands; and long retained an affection for Scotland;-that, I suppose, I imbibed from my mother. My love for it, however, was at one time much shaken by the critique in The Edinburgh Review' on The Hours of Idleness,' and I transferred a portion of my dislike to the country; but my affection for it soon flowed back into its old channel.

"I don't know from whom I inherited verse-making; probably the wild scenery of Morven and Lochna-garr, and the banks of the Dee, were the parents of my poetical vein, and the developers of my poetical boss. If it was so, it was dormant; at least, I never wrote any thing worth mentioning till I was in love. Dante dates his passion for Beatrice at twelve. I was almost as young when I fell over head and ears in love; but I anticipate. I was sent to Harrow at twelve, and spent my vacations at Newstead. It was there that I first saw Mary C. She was Note. He wrote about this time The Curse of Minerva ;' in which he seems very closely to have followed Churchill. He came to England in 1798.

"Which pleased him, and yet pleased him not ;-and why? "Time taught him a deep answer."

The Dream.

several years older than myself: but, at my age, boys like something older than themselves, as they do younger, later in life. Our estates adjoined: but, owing to the unhappy circumstance of the feud to which I before alluded, our families (as is generally the case with neighbours who happen to be relations) were never on terms of more than common civility,scarcely those. I passed the summer vacation of this year among the Malvern hills: those were days of romance! She was the beau idéal of all that my youthful fancy could paint of beautiful; and I have taken all my fables about the celestial nature of wōmen from the perfection my imagination created in her-I say created, for I found her, like the rest of the sex, any thing but angelic.

"I returned to Harrow, after my trip to Cheltenham, more deeply enamoured than ever, and passed the next holidays at Newstead. I now began to fancy myself a man, and to make love in earnest.

"I have a passion for the name of 'Mary,'
"For once it was a magic sound to me ;

"And still it half calls up the realms of fairy,
"Where I beheld what never was to be.

"All feelings changed, but this was last to vary-
"A spell from which even yet I am not quite free.
"But I grow sad-

Don Juan, Canto V. Stanza 4.

"Yet still, to pay my court I

"Gave what I had a heart :-as the world went, I

"Gave what was worth a world,—for worlds could never "Restore me the pure feelings gone for ever!

""Twas the boy's 'mite,' and, like the widow's,' may, "Perhaps, be weighed hereafter, if not now."

Don Juan, Canto VI. Stanza 5, &c.

Our