CHAPTER V.

We opened our budget in the last chapter with the _Quarterly Review_, which was just getting upon its legs through the smart, keen, and hard writing of Mr. William Gifford. It throve afterward under the coddling of the most literary of the Tory gentlemen in London, and its title has always been associated with the names of John Wilson Croker, of Dr. Southey, and of Mr. Lockhart. It is a journal, too, which has always been tied by golden bonds to the worship of tradition and of vested privilege, and which has always been ready with its petulant, impatient bark of detraction at reform or reformers, or at any books which may have had a scent of Liberalism. Leigh Hunt, of course, came in for periodic scathings--some of them deserved; some not deserved. Indeed, I am half-disposed to repent what may have seemed a too flippant mention of this very graceful poet and essayist. Of a surety, there is an abounding affluence of easy language--gushing and disporting over his pages--which lures one into reading and into dreamy acquiescence; but read as much as we may, and as long as we will, we shall go away from the reading with a certain annoyance that there is so little to keep out of it all--so little that sticks to the ribs and helps.

As for the poet Moore, of whom also we may have spoken in terms which may seem of too great disparagement to those who have loved to linger in his

“Vale of Cashmere With its roses, the brightest that earth ever gave. Its temples, and grottos, and fountains as clear As the love-lighted eyes that hang over their wave,”

no matter what may become of these brilliant orientalisms, or of his life of Byron, or of his diaries, and his “Two-penny Post Bag,” it is certain that his name will be gratefully kept alive by his sparkling, patriotic, and most musical Irish melodies; and under that sufficient monument we leave him.

As for Landor--surely the pages in which we dealt with him were not too long: a strange, strong bit of manhood--as of one fed on collops of bear’s meat; a big animal nature, yet wonderfully transfused by a vivid intellectuality--fine and high--that pierced weighty subjects to their core; and yet--and yet, singing such heart-shivering tributes as that to Rose Aylmer: coarse as the bumpkins on the sheep wolds of Lincoln, and yet with as fine subtleties in him as belonged to the young Greeks who clustered about the writer of the _Œdipus Tyrannus_.

_The “First Gentleman.”_

King George IV. was an older man than any of those we have commented on; indeed, he was a prematurely old man at sixty-five--feeling the shivers and the stings of his wild life: I suppose no one ever felt the approaches of age more mortifyingly. He had counted so much on being the fine gentleman to the last--such a height, such a carriage, such a grace! It was a dark day for him when his mirror showed wrinkles that his cosmetics would not cover, and a stoop in the shoulders which his tailors could not bolster out of sight. Indeed, in his later years he shrunk from exposure of his infirmities, and kept his gouty step out of reach of the curious, down at Windsor, where he built a cottage in a wood; and arranged his drives through the Park so that those who had admired this Apollo at his best should never know of his shakiness. Thither went his conclave of political advisers--sometimes Canning, the wonderful orator--sometimes the Duke of Wellington, with the honors of Waterloo upon him--sometimes young Sir Robert Peel, just beginning to make his influence felt; oftener yet, Charles Greville, whose memoirs are full of piquant details about the royal household--not forgetting that army of tailors and hair-dressers who did their best to assuage the misery and gratify the vanities of the gouty king. And when he died--which he hated exceedingly to do--in 1830, there came to light such a multitude of waistcoats, breeches, canes, snuff-boxes, knee-buckles, whips, and wigs, as I suppose were never heaped before around any man’s remains. The first gentleman in Europe could not, after all, carry these things with him. His brother, William IV., who succeeded him, was a bluff old Admiral--with not so high a sense of the proprieties of life as George; but honester even in his badnesses (which were very many) and, with all his coarseness and vulgarity, carrying a brusque, sailor-like frankness that half redeemed his peccadilloes. In those stormy times which belonged to the passage of the Reform Bill of 1832, he showed nerve and pluck, and if he split the air pretty often with his oaths, he never offended by a wearying dilettanteism, or by foppery. In the year 1837 he died; and then and there began--within the memory of a good many of us old stagers--that reign of his young niece Victoria, daughter of his brother, the Duke of Kent (who had died seventeen years before)--which reign still continues, and is still resplendent with the virtues of the Sovereign and the well-being of her people.

Under these several royal hands, the traditional helpfulness to men of letters had declared itself in pensions and civil appointments; Southey had come to his laureateship, and his additional pension; we found the venerable Wordsworth making a London pilgrimage for a “kissing of hands,” and the honor of a royal stipend; Walter Scott had received his baronetcy at the hands of George IV., and that dilettante sovereign would have taken Byron (whom we shall presently encounter) patronizingly by the hand, except the fiery poet--scenting slights everywhere--had flamed up in that spirit of proud defiance, which afterward declared itself with a fury of denunciation in the _Irish Avatar_ (1821).

_Hazlitt and Hallam._

Another noticeable author of this period, whose cynicism kept him very much by himself, was William Hazlitt;[53] he was the son of a clergyman and very precocious--hearing Coleridge preach in his father’s pulpit at Wem in Shropshire, and feeling his ambition stirred by the notice of that poet, who was attracted by the shrewd speech and great forehead of the boy. Young Hazlitt drifts away from such early influences to Paris and to painting--he thinking to master that art. But in this he does nothing satisfying; he next appears in London, to carve a way to fame with his pen. He is an acute observer; he is proud; he is awkward; he is shy. Charles Lamb and sister greatly befriend him and take to him; and he, with his hate of conventionalisms, loves those Lamb chambers and the whist parties, where he can go, in whatever slouch costume he may choose; poor Mary Lamb, too, perceiving that he has a husband-ish hankering after a certain female friend of hers--blows hot and cold upon it, in her quaint little notelets, with a delighted and an undisguised sense of being a party to their little game. It ended in a marriage at last; not without its domestic infelicities; but these would be too long, and too dreary for the telling. Mr. Hazlitt wrote upon a vast variety of topics--upon art, and the drama, upon economic questions, upon politics--as wide in his range as Leigh Hunt; and though he was far more trenchant, more shrewd, more disputatious, more thoughtful, he did lack Hunt’s easy pliancy and grace of touch. Though a wide reader and acute observer, Hazlitt does not contend or criticise by conventional rules; his law of measurement is not by old syntactic, grammatic, or dialectic practices; there’s no imposing display of critical implements (by which some operators dazzle us), but he cuts--quick and sharp--to the point at issue. We never forget his strenuous, high-colored personality, and the seething of his prejudices--whether his talk is of Napoleon (in which he is not reverent of average British opinion), or of Sir Joshua Reynolds, or of Burke’s brilliant oratorical apostrophes. But with fullest recognition of his acuteness, and independence, there remains a disposition (bred by his obstinacies and shortcomings) to take his conclusions _cum grano salis_. He never quite disabuses our mind of the belief that he is a paid advocate; he never conquers by calm; and, upon the whole, impresses one as a man who found little worth the living for in this world, and counted upon very little in any other.

The historian, Henry Hallam,[54] on the other hand, who was another notable literary character of this epoch, was full of all serenities of character--even under the weight of such private griefs as were appalling. He was studious, honest, staid--with a great respect for decorum; he would have gravitated socially--as he did--rather to Holland House than to the chambers where Lamb presided over the punch-bowl. In describing the man one describes his histories; slow, calm, steady even to prosiness, yet full; not entertaining in a gossipy sense; not brilliant; scarce ever eloquent. If he is in doubt upon a point he tells you so; if there has been limitation to his research, there is no concealment of it; I think, upon the whole, the honestest of all English historians. In his search for truth, neither party, nor tradition, nor religious scruples make him waver. None can make their historic journey through the Middle Ages without taking into account the authorities he has brought to notice, and the path that he has scored.

And yet there is no atmosphere along that path as he traces it. People and towns and towers and monarchs pile along it, clearly defined, but in dead shapes. He had not the art--perhaps he would have disdained the art--to touch all these with picturesque color, and to make that page of the world’s history glow and palpitate with life.

Among those great griefs which weighed upon the historian, and to which allusion has been made, I name that one only with which you are perhaps familiar--I mean the sudden death of his son Arthur, a youth of rare accomplishments--counted by many of more brilliant promise than any young Englishman of his time--yet snatched from life, upon a day of summer’s travel, as by a thunderbolt. He lies buried in Clevedon Church, which overhangs the waters of Bristol Channel; and his monument is Tennyson’s wonderful memorial poem.

I will not quote from it; but cite only the lines “out of which” (says Dr. John Brown), “as out of the well of the living waters of Love, flows forth all _In Memoriam_.”

“Break--break--break At the foot of thy crags, O sea: But the tender grace of a day that is dead Will never come back to me. And the stately ships go on To their haven under the hill; But O, for the touch of a vanished hand And the sound of a voice that is still.”

I have purposely set before you two strongly contrasted types of English literary life in that day--in William Hazlitt and Henry Hallam--the first representing very nearly what we would call the Bohemian element--ready to-day for an article in the _Edinburgh Review_, and to-morrow for a gibe in the _Examiner_, or a piece of diablerie in the _London Magazine_; Hallam, on the other hand, representing the sober and orderly traditions, colored by the life and work of such men as Hume, Roscoe, and Gibbon.

_Queen of a Salon._

Another group of literary people, of a very varied sort, we should have found in the salons of my Lady Blessington,[55] who used to hold court on the Thames--now by Piccadilly, and again at Gore House--in the early part of this century. She was herself a writer; nor is her personal history without its significance, as an outgrowth of times when George IV. was setting the pace for those ambitious of social distinction.

She was the quick-witted daughter of an Irish country gentleman of the Lucius O’Trigger sort--nicknamed Beau Power. He loved a whip and fast horses--also dogs, powder, and blare. He wore white-topped boots, with showy frills and ruffles; he drank hard, swore harder--wasted his fortune, abused his wife, but was “very fine” to the end. He was as cruel as he was fine; shot a peasant once, in cold blood, and dragged him home after his saddle beast. He worried his daughter, Marguerite (Lady Blessington), into marrying, at fifteen, a man whom she detested. It gave relief, however, from paternal protection, until the husband proved worse than the father, and separation ensued--made good (after some years of tumultuous, uneasy life) by the violent and providential death of the recreant husband. Shortly after, she married Lord Blessington, a rich Irish nobleman, very much blasé, seven years her senior, but kind and always generous with her. Then came travel in a princely way over the Continent, with long stays in pleasant places, and such lavish spendings as put palaces at their disposal--of all which a readable and gossipy record is given in her _Idler in Italy_ and _Idler in France_--books well known, in their day, in America. Of course she encountered in these ramblings Landor, Shelley, Byron, and all notable Englishmen, and when she returned to London it was to establish that brilliant little court already spoken of. She was admirably fitted for sovereign of such a court; she was witty, ready, well-instructed; was beautiful, too, and knew every art of the toilet.[56]

More than this, she was mistress of all the pretty and delicate arts of conciliation; had amazing aptitude for accommodating herself to different visitors--flattering men without letting them know they were flattered--softening difficulties, bringing enemies together, magnetizing the most obstinate and uncivil into acquiescence with her rules of procedure. Withal she had in large development those Irish traits of generosity and cheer, with a natural, winning way, which she studied to make more and more taking. One of those women who, with wit, prettiness, and grace, count it the largest, as it is (to them) the most agreeable duty of life, to be forever making social conquests, and forever reaping the applause of drawing-rooms. And if we add to the smiles and the witty banter and the persuasive tones of our lady, the silken hangings, the velvet carpets, the mirrors multiplying inviting alcoves, with paintings by Cattermole or Stothard, and marbles, maybe by Chantrey or Westmacott, and music in its set time by the best of London masters, and cooking in its season as fine as the music,--and we shall be at no loss to measure the attractions of Gore House, and to judge of the literary and social aspects which blazed there on the foggy banks of the Thames. No wonder that old Samuel Rogers, prince of epicures, should love to carry his pinched face and his shrunk shanks into such sunny latitudes. Moore, too, taking his mincing steps into those regions, would find banquets to remind him of the Bowers of Bendemeer. Possibly, too, the Rev. Sydney Smith, without the fear of Lady Holland in his heart or eyes, may have pocketed his dignity as Canon of St. Paul’s and gone thither to taste the delights of the table or of the talk. Even Hallam, or Southey (on his rare visits to town), may have gone there. Lady Blessington was always keenly awake for such arrivals. Even Brougham used to take sometimes his clumsy presence to her brilliant home; and so, on occasion, did that younger politician, and accomplished gentleman, Sir Robert Peel. Procter--better known as Barry Cornwall--the song-writer, was sure to know his way to those doors and to be welcomed; and Leigh Hunt was always eager to play off his fine speeches amid such surroundings of wine and music.

The Comte d’Orsay, artist and man of letters, who married (1827) a daughter of Lord Blessington (step-daughter of the Countess), was a standing ornament of the house; and rivalling him in their cravats and other millinery were two young men who had long careers before them. These were Benjamin Disraeli and Edward Lytton Bulwer.

_Young Bulwer and Disraeli._

It was some years before the passage of the Reform bill, and before the death of George IV., that Bulwer[57] blazed out in _Pelham_ (1828), _The Disowned_, and _Devereux_, making conquest of the novel-reading town, at a time when _Quentin Durward_ (1823) was not an old book, and _Woodstock_ (1826) still fresh. And if Pelhamism had its speedy subsidence, the same writer put such captivating historic garniture and literary graces about the Italian studies of _Rienzi_, and of the _Last Days of Pompeii_, as carry them now into most libraries, and insure an interested reading--notwithstanding a strong sensuous taint and sentimental extravagances.

He had scholarship; he had indefatigable industry; he had abounding literary ambitions and enthusiasms, but he had no humor; I am afraid he had not a very sensitive conscience; and he had no such pervading refinement of literary taste as to make his work serve as the exemplar for other and honester workers.

Benjamin Disraeli[58] in those days overmatched him in cravats and in waistcoats, and was the veriest fop of all fop-land. No more beautiful accessory could be imagined to the drawing-room receptions over which Lady Blessington presided, and of which the ineffable Comte d’Orsay was a shining and a fixed light, than this young Hebraic scion of a great Judean house--whose curls were of the color of a raven’s wing, and whose satin trumpery was ravishing!

And yet--this young foppish Disraeli, within fifty years, held the destinies of Great Britain in his hand, and had endowed the Queen with the grandest title she had ever worn--that of Empress of India. Still further, in virtue of his old friendship for his fellow fop Bulwer, he sends the son of that novelist (in the person of the second Lord Lytton) to preside over a nation numbering two hundred millions of souls. Whoever can accomplish these ends with such a people as that of Great Britain must needs have something in him beyond mere fitness for the pretty salons of my Lady Blessington.

And what was it? Whatever you may count it, there is surely warrant for telling you something of his history and his antecedents: Three or more centuries ago--at the very least--a certain Jew of Cordova, in Spain, driven out by the terrors of the Inquisition, went to Venice--established himself there in merchandise, and his family throve there for two hundred years. A century and a half ago,--when the fortunes of Venice were plainly on the wane--the head of this Jewish family--Benjamin Disraeli (grandfather of the one of whom we speak) migrated to England. This first English Benjamin met with success on the Exchange of London, and owing to the influences of his wife (who hated all Jewry) he discarded his religious connection with Hebraism, went to the town of Enfield, a little north of London--with a good fortune, and lived there the life of a retired country gentleman. He had a son Isaac, who devoted himself to the study of literature, and showed early strong bookish proclivities--very much to the grief of his father, who had a shrewd contempt for all such follies. Yet the son Isaac persisted, and did little else through a long life, save to prosecute inquiries about the struggles of authors and the lives of authors and the work of authors--all ending in that agglomeration which we know as the _Curiosities of Literature_--a book which sixty years since used to be reckoned a necessary part of all well-equipped libraries; but which--to tell truth--has very little value; being without any method, without fulness, and without much accuracy. It is very rare that so poor a book gets so good a name, and wears it so long.

Oddly enough, this father, who had devoted a life to the mere gossip of literature, as it were, warns his son Benjamin against literary pursuits (he wrote three or four novels indeed,[59] but they are never heard of), and the son studied mostly under private tutors; there is no full or trustworthy private biography of him: but we know that in the years 1826-1827--only a short time before the Lady Blessington coterie was in its best feather--he wrote a novel called _Vivian Grey_,--the author being then under twenty-two--which for a time divided attention with _Pelham_. In club circles it made even more talk. It is full of pictures of people of the day; Brougham and Wilson Croker, and Southey, and George Canning, and Mrs. Coutts and Lady Melbourne (Caroline Lamb), all figure in it. He never gave over, indeed, putting portraits in his books--as Goldwin Smith can tell us. The larger Reviews were coy of praise and coy of condemnation: indeed ’twas hard to say which way it pointed--socially or politically; but, for the scandal-mongers, there was in it very appetizing meat. He became a lion of the salons; and he enjoyed the lionhood vastly. Chalon[60] painted him in that day--a very Adonis--gorgeous in velvet coat and in ruffled shirt.

But he grew tired of England and made his trip of travel; it followed by nearly a score of years after that of Childe Harold, and was doubtless largely stimulated by it; three years he was gone--wandering over all the East, as well as Europe. He came back with an epic (published 1834), believing that it was to fill men’s minds, and to conquer a place for him among the great poets of the century. In this he was dismally mistaken; so he broke his lyre, and that was virtually the last of his poesy. There came, however, out of these journeyings, besides the poem, the stories of _Contarini Fleming_, of _The Young Duke_, and _The Wondrous Tale of Alroy_. These kept his fame alive, but seemed after all only the work of a man playing with literature, rather than of one in earnest.

With ambition well sharpened now, by what he counted neglect, he turned to politics; as the son of a country gentleman of easy fortune, it was not difficult to make place for himself. Yet, with all the traditions of a country gentleman about him, in his first moves he was not inclined to Toryism; indeed, he startled friends by his radicalism--was inclined to shake hands at the outset with the arch-agitator O’Connell; but not identifying himself closely with either party; and so, to the last it happened that his sympathies were halved in most extraordinary way; he had the concurrence of the most staid, Toryish, and conservative of country voters; and no man could, like himself, bring all the jingoes of England howling at his back. Indeed, nothing is more remarkable in his career than his shrewd adaptation of policy to meet existing, or approaching tides of feeling; he does not avow great convictions of duty, and stand by them; but he toys with convictions; studies the weakness, as he does the power, of those with him or against him; shifts his ground accordingly; rarely lacking poise, and the attitude of seeming steadfastness; whipping with his scourge of a tongue the little lapses of his adversaries till they shrill all over the kingdom; and putting his own triumphs--great or small--into such scenic combination, with such beat of drum, and blare of trumpet, as to make all England break out into bravos.[61] There was not that literary quality in his books, either early or late, which will give to them, I think, a very long life; but there was in the man a quality of shrewdness and of power which will be long remembered--perhaps not always to his honor.

I do not yield to any in admiration for the noble and philanthropic qualities which belong to the venerable, retired statesman of Hawarden; yet I cannot help thinking that if such a firm and audacious executive hand as belonged to Lord Beaconsfield, had--in the season of General Gordon’s stress at Khartoum--controlled the fleets and armies of Great Britain, there would have been quite other outcome to the sad imbroglio in the Soudan. When war is afoot, the apostles of peace are the poorest of directors.

I go back for a moment to that Blessington Salon--in order to close her story. There was a narrowed income--a failure of her jointure--a shortening of her book sales; but, notwithstanding, there was a long struggle to keep that brilliant little court alive. One grows to like so much the music and the fêtes and the glitter of the chandeliers, and the unction of flattering voices! But at last the ruin came; on a sudden the sheriffs were there; and clerks with their inventories in place of the “Tokens” and “annuals”--with their gorgeous engravings by Finden & Heath--which the Mistress had exploited; and she hurried off--after the elegant D’Orsay--to Paris, hoping to rehabilitate herself, on the Champs Elysées, under the wing of Louis Napoleon, just elected President. I chanced to see her in her coupé there, on a bright afternoon early in 1849--with elegant silken wraps about her and a shimmer of the old kindly smile upon her shrunken face--dashing out to the Bois; but within three months there was another sharp change; she--dead, and her pretty _decolleté_ court at an end forever.

_The Poet of Newstead._

The reminiscences and conversations of Lord Byron, which we have at the hands of Lady Blessington, belong to a time, of course, much earlier than her series of London triumphs, and date with her journeys in Italy. A score of years at least before ever the chandeliers of her Irish ladyship were lighted in Gore House, Byron[62] had gone sailing away from England under a storm of wrath; and he never came back again. Indeed it is not a little extraordinary that one of the most typical of English poets, should--like Landor, with whom he had many traits in common--have passed so little of his active life on English ground. Like Landor, he loved England most when England was most behind him. Like Landor, he was gifted with such rare powers as belonged to few Englishmen of that generation. In Landor these powers, so far as they expressed themselves in literary form, were kept in check by the iron rulings of a scrupulous and exacting craftsmanship; while in Byron they broke all trammels, whether of craftsmanship or reason, and glowed and blazed the more by reason of their audacities. Both were prone to great tempests of wrath which gave to both furious joys, and, I think, as furious regrets.

Byron came by his wrathfulness in good hereditary fashion--as we shall find if we look back only a little way into the records of that Newstead family. Newstead Abbey (more properly Priory, the archæologists tell us) is the name of that great English home--half a ruin--associated with the early years of the poet, but never for much time or in any true sense a home of his own. It is some ten miles north of Nottingham, in an interesting country, where lay the old Sherwood Forest, with its traditions of Robin Hood; there is a lichened Gothic front which explains the Abbey name; there are great rambling corridors and halls; there is a velvety lawn, with the monument to “Boatswain,” the poet’s dog; but one who goes there--with however much of Byronic reading in his or her mind--will not, I think, warm toward the locality; and the curious foot-traveller will incline to trudge away in a hunt for Annesley, and the “Antique Oratory.”

Well, in that ancient home, toward the end of the last century, there lived, very much by himself, an old Lord Byron, who some thirty years before, in a fit of wild rage, had killed a neighbor and kinsman of the name of Chaworth; there was indeed a little show of a duel about the murder--which was done in a London tavern, and by candle-light. His peerage, however, only saved this “wicked lord,” as he was called, from prison; and at Newstead his life smouldered out in 1798, under clouds of hate, and of distrust. His son was dead before him; so was his grandson, the last heir in direct line; but he had a younger brother, John, who was a great seaman--who published accounts of his voyages,[63] which seem always to have been stormy, and which lend, maybe, some realistic touches to the shipwreck scenes in “Don Juan.” A son of this voyager was the father of the poet, and was reputed to be as full of wrath and turbulence as his uncle who killed the Chaworth; and his life was as thick with disaster as that of the unlucky voyager. His first marriage was a runaway one with a titled lady, whose heart he broke, and who died leaving that lone daughter who became the most worthy Lady Augusta Leigh. For second wife he married Miss Gordon, a Scotch heiress, the mother of the poet, whose fortune he squandered, and whose heart also he would have broken--if it had been of a breaking quality. With such foregoers of his own name, one might look for bad blood in the boy; nor was his mother saint-like; she had her storms of wrath; and from the beginning, I think, gave her boy only cruel milk to drink.

His extreme boyhood was passed near to Aberdeen, with the Highlands not far off. How much those scenes impressed him, we do not know; but that some trace was left may be found in verses written near his death:--

“He who first met the Highland’s 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.”

When the boy was ten, the wicked lord who had killed the Chaworth died; and the Newstead inheritance fell to the young poet. We can imagine with what touch of the pride that shivers through so many of his poems, this lad--just lame enough to make him curse that unlucky fate--paced first down the hall at Newstead--thenceforth master there--a Peer of England.

But the estate was left in sorry condition; the mother could not hold it as a residence; so they went to Nottingham--whereabout the boy seems to have had his first schooling. Not long afterward we find him at Harrow, not far out of London, where he makes one or two of the few friendships which abide; there, too, he gives first evidence of his power over language.

It is at about this epoch, also, that on his visits to Nottingham--which is not far from the Chaworth home of Annesley--comes about the spinning of those little webs of romance which are twisted afterward into the beautiful Chaworth “Dream.” It is an old story to tell, yet how everlastingly fresh it keeps!

“The maid was on the eve of womanhood; The boy had fewer summers, but his heart Had far outgrown his years, and to his eye There was but one beloved face on earth, And that was shining on him; he had looked Upon it till it could not pass away; He had no breath, nor being, but in hers, She was his voice … upon a tone, A touch of hers, his blood would ebb and flow, And his cheek change tempestuously--his heart Unknowing of its cause of agony.”

As a matter of fact, Miss Chaworth was two years older, and far more mature than he; she was gentle too, and possessed of a lady-like calm, which tortured him--since he could not break it down. Indeed, through all the time when he was sighing, she was looking over his head at Mr. Musters--who was bluff and hearty, and who rode to the hounds, and was an excellent type of the rollicking, self-satisfied, and beef-eating English squire--whom she married.

_Early Verse and Marriage._

After this episode came Cambridge, and those _Hours of Idleness_ which broke out into verse, and caught the scathing lash of Henry Brougham--then a young, but well-known, advocate, who was conspiring with Sydney Smith and Jeffrey (as I have told you) to renovate the world through the pages of the _Edinburgh Review_.

But this lashing brought a stinging reply; and the clever, shrewd, witty couplets of Byron’s satire upon the Scottish Reviewers (1809), convinced all scholarly readers that a new and very piquant pen had come to the making of English verse. Nor were Byron’s sentimentalisms of that day all so crude and ill-shapen as Brougham would have led the public to suppose. I quote a fragment from a little poem under date of 1808--he just twenty:

“The dew of the morning Sunk chill on my brow It felt like the warning Of what I feel now, Thy vows are all broken And light is thy fame; I hear thy name spoken, And share in its shame.

“They name thee before me, A knell to mine ear; A shudder comes o’er me-- Why wert thou so dear? They know not I knew thee, Who knew thee too well; Long, long shall I rue thee Too deeply to tell.”

Naturally enough, our poet is beaming with the success of his satire, which is widely read, and which has made him foes of the first rank; but what cares he for this? He goes down with a company of fellow roisterers, and makes the old walls of Newstead ring with the noisy celebration of his twenty-first birthday; and on the trail of that country revel, and with the sharp, ringing couplets of his “English Bards” crackling on the public ear, he breaks away for his first joyous experience of Continental travel. This takes him through Spain and to the Hellespont and among the isles of Greece--seeing visions there and dreaming dreams, all which are braided into that tissue of golden verse we know as the first two cantos of _Childe Harold_.

On his return, and while as yet this poem of travel is on the eve of publication, he prepares himself for a new _coup_ in Parliament--being not without his oratorical ambitions. It was in February of 1812 that he made his maiden speech in the House of Lords--carefully worded, calm, not without quiet elegancies of diction--but not meeting such reception as his extravagant expectation demanded; whatever he does, he wishes met with a tempest of approval; a dignified welcome, to his fiery nature, seems cold.

But the publication of _Childe Harold_, only a short time later, brings compensating torrents of praise. His satire had piqued attention without altogether satisfying it; there was little academic merit in it--none of the art which made _Absalom and Achitophel_ glow, or which gleamed upon the sword-thrusts of the _Dunciad_; but its stabs were business-like; its couplets terse, slashing, and full of truculent, scorching _vires iræ_. This other verse, however, of _Childe Harold_--which took one upon the dance of waves and under the swoop of towering canvass to the groves of “Cintra’s glorious Eden,” and among those Spanish vales where Dark Guadiana “rolls his power along;” and thence on, by proud Seville, and fair Cadiz, to those shores of the Egean, where

“Still his honeyed wealth Hymettus yields,--”[64]

was of quite another order. There is in it, moreover, the haunting personality of the proud, broken-spirited wanderer, who tells the tale and wraps himself in the veil of mysterious and piquant sorrows: Withal there is such dash and spirit, such mastery of language, such marvellous descriptive power, such subtle pauses and breaks, carrying echoes beyond the letter--as laid hold on men and women--specially on women--in a way that was new and strange. And this bright meteor had flashed athwart a sky where such stars as Southey, and Scott, and Rogers, and the almost forgotten Crabbe, and Coleridge, and Wordsworth had been beaming for many a day. Was it strange that the doors of London should be flung wide open to this fresh, brilliant singer who had blazed such a path through Spain and Greece, and who wore a coronet upon his forehead?

He was young, too, and handsome as the morning; and must be mated--as all the old dowagers declared. So said his friends--his sister chiefest among them; and the good Lady Melbourne (mother-in-law of Lady Caroline Lamb)--not without discreet family reasons of her own--fixed upon her charming niece, Miss Milbanke, as the one with whom the new poet should be coupled, to make his way through the wildernesses before him. And there were other approvals; even Tom Moore--who, of all men, knew his habits best--saying a reluctant “Yes”--after much hesitation. And so, through a process of coy propositions and counter-propositions, the marriage was arranged at last, and came about down at Seaham House (near Stockton-on-Tees), the country home of the father, Sir Ralph Milbanke.

“Her face was fair, but was not that which made The starlight of his boyhood; as he stood Even at the altar, o’er his brow there came The self-same aspect, and the quivering shock That in the Antique Oratory shook His bosom in its solitude; and then-- As in that hour--a moment o’er his face The tablet of unutterable thoughts Was traced; and then it faded as it came, And he stood calm and quiet, and he spoke The fitting vows, but heard not his own words, And all things reeled around him.”[65]

Yet the service went on to its conclusion; and the music pealed, and the welcoming shouts broke upon the air, and the adieux were spoken; and together, they two drove away--into the darkness.