same year, and in March, he took his seat in the house of lords. He was much pained by the coldness shown him by a relative, by whom he had expected to be introduced on that occasion; and Mr. Moore attributes his determination to leave England immediately after this, to the mortification he experienced at his lonely and friendless position, and the want of means suited to his rank. The bitter sadness which even then was creeping over his naturally vivacious and affectionate disposition, may be traced in the celebrated epitaph on his favourite dog, written in 1808; and the kindness of his heart in the eagerness and delicacy with which, notwithstanding his own pecuniary embarrassments, he gave liberal assistance to the family of Lord Falkland, when that gentleman was killed in a duel. His melancholy before starting was increased, and his sensitiveness much wounded by the refusal of a former schoolfellow, to whom he was deeply attached, to spend a farewell hour with him on the last day he passed in England, on plea of an engagement to go shopping. He left London in June, and visited Portugal, Spain, Greece, and Turkey. During this journey he composed the first and second cantos of "Childe Harold." He returned to England in 1811. Almost immediately on his arrival, he heard of his mother's severe illness, and hastened to Newstead Abbey, but arrived too late to see her alive. His grief at her death was such as to surprise those who were aware how little of a mother's tenderness he had ever known. In 1812 he published the two first cantos of "Childe Harold," which instantly placed him at the summit of popularity and fame. He gave the copyright of this and many later poems to a friend, having determined not to take money for his works, a resolution which he only reluctantly abandoned, in after years, from necessity. Mr. Hodgeson says—"Were it possible to state all he has done for numerous friends, he would appear amiable indeed. For myself, I am bound to acknowledge, in the fullest and warmest manner, his generous and well-timed aid; and were my poor friend Bland alive, he would as gladly bear a like testimony." Even a man who had unworthily libelled him was relieved by Lord Byron's ever open hand. In 1813 he published the "Giaour," "Bride of Abydos," and "Corsair;" and in 1814, "Lara." In this year, yielding to the advice of friends, he made an offer of marriage to Miss Milbank, and was accepted. He was married on the 2nd of January, 1815. This marriage, entered into rather from the influence of others, than from deep affection, was a grave error. With feelings such as he has described in the "Dream," Byron had no right to marry; and, indeed, the friends who urged the step upon him appear to have been chiefly actuated by motives of conventional propriety and advantage, quite unworthy of the occasion. Yet Byron seems to have been really attached to his wife; his letters, written after marriage, speak of happiness; and he even playfully wrote to Moore, that "if marriage were to be upon lease, he would gladly renew his own for ninety-nine years." His daughter, Ada, was born on the 10th December, 1815. In January, 1816, Lady Byron left town on a visit to her father's house in Lancashire. "They had parted in the utmost kindness; she wrote him a letter full of playfulness and affection on the road and, immediately on her arrival at Kirkby Mallory, her father wrote to acquaint Lord Byron that she would return to him no more. This unexpected shock fell upon him at a time when those pecuniary embarrassments, which had been fast gathering around him during the whole of the last year (there having been no less than eight or nine executions in the house during that period), had arrived at their utmost; and at a moment, when, to use his own strong expressions, he was ' standing alone on his hearth with all his household gods shivered round him,' he was also doomed to receive the startling intelligence, that the wife who had just parted from him in kindness, had parted from him for ever." The causes of this separation have never been explained. Lord Byron, though he spoke bitterly of his wife's parents, generously exculpated her; he was until the close of his life ever ready for a reconciliation, and though deeply attached to his child, he never attempted to withdraw her from her mother's care. In the memoirs he presented to Mr. Moore, with orders to publish them after his death, a detailed account was given of all the circumstances of his marriage and separation, "as frank as usual in his avowal of his own errors, and generously just towards Lady B." Mr. Moore, however, after Lord Byron's death, was induced to suppress these memoirs, and to accept a sum of money in compensation for his own loss—forgetful of the loss sustained by the public in the transaction. Lord Byron had directed that the memoir should be shown to his wife before publication, "that she might have it in her power to mark anything mistaken or misstated."—The storm of calumny and abuse that now burst forth on all sides against his lordship was undoubtedly the chief cause of his again determining to leave England. He met, as he said, "condemnation without a charge, sentence without trial, and was exiled by ostracism." . . . "I was accused of every monstrous vice by public rumour and private rancour. My name, which had been a knightly and noble one since my fathers helped to conquer the kingdom for William the Conqueror, was tainted. I felt that if what was whispered and muttered were true, I was unfit for England; if false, England was unfit for me." "Such an outcry was now raised as perhaps, in no case of private life, was ever raised before. Hardly a word was spoken, certainly none was listened to, in his favour." Moore attributes the unexampled fury of the public to jealousy, and says that "those who had long sickened under the splendour of the poet, were now enabled, under the guise of champions for innocence, to wreak their vengeance on the man." Lord Byron professed himself unable to discover the secret of this hatred, and concluded that he must be "personally obnoxious," as "without at least a charge or accusation of some kind, actually expressed and substantiated," he could "hardly believe that the mere common and every-day occurrence, a separation between a man and his wife, would in itself produce so great a ferment." The true causes are in the very nature and character of Lord Byron's mind, which were "obnoxious" to so much of the spirit and temper of England in his own day, and still prevent him from being appreciated by a large portion of his countrymen. Madame de Stael saw further into the truth than his lordship, when she said to him—"You should not have warred with the world, it won't do;" but she did not comprehend that to war with the world that surrounded him was the mission of Lord Byron's genius, the source alike of his power and his pain. Nay, warfare in the abstract, was, in several senses, a condition of his nature: and much of his poetry sprang out of the friction of opposing principles in his own mind. Like very many great men, he lived largely in the midst of contradictions, as if he had been made up of two conflicting modes of being. Though naturally most generous, he could yet be selfish; he could be isolated, or social, affable, and ingenuous; and even in his most defiant moods, his happiness, quite as much as that of most men, depended on the approbation of those around him. He had mixed personally, and apparently not disapprovingly, with the follies he condemned. He never escaped from an overbearing and very painful self-consciousness. The self-possession which he so much admired, was perhaps the quality he was farthest from attaining: to the last, he was ruffled by little jealousies. Most strangely of all, while revolting utterly from the restraints of English society, and the limitations of English thought, he was yet an English peer of the nineteenth century. A large democratic spirit undoubtedly possessed him, and often, as if in spite of himself, his wide and strong sympathies led him far beyond the confines of the circle of fashionable society; but he owed to his liking for that society and his interest in it, much of his influence and power. By birth an aristocrat, and sharing in the prejudices as well as the nobler qualities of his class, he struck the severest blows at the principle of aristocracy. This perhaps is the source of the singular power, and the true inward and highest sense of his poems. He has been said to have summed up the era of Individuality, and to have cleared the way for one of Association, or of Humanity. Aristocracy, viewed from a philosophical point of view, is, in fact, the Individual separating itself from the Collective Life, and asserting some sort of vital distinction between itself and its fellows, claiming to work out an exclusive existence, and to draw nothing from the common sources of life. The isolated individual being incapable of realizing this fundamental idea of aristocracy, aristocracy became of necessity a caste, but its origin is nevertheless in the assertion of the principle of individuality. Byron's heroes are all types of this struggle of individuality against the associative tendency of the nineteenth century. They all manifest the impotence of the individual to live a normal, a happy, or even a truly great life, by separating his sympathies and aspirations from those of his human brethren. Manfred, the Corsair, Lara, &c., are all powerfully and peculiarly endowed individualities, who have withdrawn themselves from the common path, and set up in war with society
