LORD BYRON.

"NATURE, after having endowed her chosen chil

dren with the grand qualities which lead to glory, obliges them to merit these gifts by their labors and their struggles. Thus there is always an abyss in the depths of all genius. A crown of stars cannot be placed upon the brow unless there is at the same time a crown of thorns around the heart. One cannot enter the temple to transcribe an immortal name, but at the cost of writing it in the blood of one's veins. . . . There is no tragedy comparable to the tragedy of Byron's own heart."

Thus writes the great lover of liberty, Emilio Castelar. George Gordon Noël Byron was born January 22, 1788, in Hollis Street, London. His father, John Byron, was an educated, unprincipled man, called "Mad Jack," who ran away with and married the wife of the Duke of Leeds, and after the birth of his daughter, Augusta, and the death of his wife, married Catherine Gordon of Gight, spent her money, and abandoned her and her infant. He died when his son was three years old.

Mrs. Byron, an impetuous, unhappy woman, though loving her child ardently, nearly spoiled all that was lovable in him, by her injudicious training. Lame from his birth, like Sir Walter Scott, one foot being an inch and a half shorter than the other, she called him "a

lame brat," and "a little dog," when angry with him, and flung a poker at his head. Parents who use no selfcontrol must expect none in their children.

When not quite five years old, young Byron was sent to a day-school in Aberdeen, his mother having removed thither from London. He learned little, and was sent to a clergyman named Ross, under whom, Byron said years afterwards, "I made astonishing progress, and I recollect to this day his mild manners and good-natured pains-taking. The moment I could read, my grand passion was history, and, why I know not, but I was particularly taken with the battle near the Lake Regillus, in the Roman History, put into my hands the first. When standing on the heights of Tusculum, and looking down upon the little round lake that was once Regillus, and which dots the immense expanse below, I remembered my young enthusiasm and my old instructor. Afterward, I had a very serious, saturnine, but kind young man, named Paterson, for a tutor. He was the son of my shoemaker, but a good scholar, as is common with the Scotch. He was a rigid Presbyterian also. With him I began Latin, in Rudiman's grammar, and continued till I went to the grammar school."

When Byron was eight years old, after an attack of scarlet fever, he was taken by his mother to the Highlands, about forty miles up the Dee from Aberdeen. "From this period," he says, "I date my love of mountainous countries. I can never forget the effect, years afterward, in England, of the only thing I had long seen, even in miniature, of a mountain, in the Malvern Hills. After I returned to Cheltenham, I used to watch them every afternoon, at sunset, with a sensation which I cannot describe."

In "The Island," which he wrote a year or two before his death, he says,

"He who first met the Highlands' swelling blue,
Will love each peak that shows a kindred hue,

Hail in each crag a friend's familiar face,

And clasp the mountain in his mind's embrace.

Long have I roam'd through lands which are not mine,
Ador'd the Alp, and lov'd the Apennine.

The infant rapture still survived the boy,
And Loch na Garr with Ida look'd o'er Troy,
Mixed Celtic memories with the Phrygian mount,
And Highland linns with Castalie's clear fount."

At this time, before he was eight, he had his first childlove. In 1813 he wrote in his journal, "I have been thinking lately a good deal of Mary Duff. How very odd that I should have been so utterly, devotedly fond of that girl, at an age when I could neither feel passion nor know the meaning of the word. And the effect! My mother used always to rally me about this childish amour; and at last, many years after, when I was sixteen, she told me one day, 'Oh, Byron! I have had a letter from Edinburgh, from Miss Abercromby, and your old sweetheart, Mary Duff, is married to a Mr. Co.' And what was my answer? I really cannot explain or account for my feelings at that moment; but they nearly threw me into convulsions, and alarmed my mother so much that, after I grew better, she generally avoided the subject. . . . How very pretty is the perfect image of her in my memory: her brown dark hair, and hazel eyes; her very dress! I should be quite grieved to see her now, the reality, however beautiful, would destroy, or at least confuse, the features of the lovely peri which then existed in her, and still lives in my imagination, at the