groom and a guest of Sir Ralph's, Byron | pany, for we find him on one occasion had the audacity to write in the following dining with Jackson the boxer and Kean the strain to Thomas Moore:

Since I wrote last, I have been transferred to my father-in-law's with my lady and my lady's maid, &c. &c. My papa, Sir Ralpho, hath reand not only at Durham, but here, several times, cently made a speech at a Durham tax-meeting; since after dinner. He is now, I believe, speaking it to himself (I left him in the middle) over various decanters, which can neither interrupt him nor fall asleep. [And in a postscript he profanely adds] I must go to tea.

damn tea."

actor. Then he was an active member of
the Drury Lane Theatre Committee, and
his duties brought him into inevitable con-
tact with the Green-room and its inmates.
kind to beget security or supineness in a
My lady was jealous, and indeed her lord's
conversation before marriage was not of a
lady so disposed. At Seaham there was no
dread, and indeed no experience, of tip-
staves; but there was no such immunity in
London. Byron was deeply in debt, most
of which he had inherited with his estates;
he had married an heiress in posse though
not in esse; his expenses were necessarily
augmented by connubial housekeeping, and
an execution was put into his house. We
need not repeat a sad story, the full partic-
ulars of which are given, and with becoming
delicacy, in these volumes.
For some
never explained reason, Lady Byron left
her husband; the cause being unknown,
rumour had full scope, and did not fail to
give all credit to one side and all blame to
the other. Thereupon followed the really
painful period of Byron's history. No allu-
sion is made to it in the volumes before us,
but the witnesses of his life in 1818, and
until 1820, accord in reprobation of it; and
Shelley bears unwilling testimony to his ex-
cesses at Venice. Byron avenged the
wrongs which he conceived the world had
done him by the most reckless disregard of
its opinion of him.

Byron at this moment was, by his own con-
fession, pining for the blue skies of the
Egean, and yearning to complete his ac-
quaintance with the sunny South. The
dulness or eloquence of Sir Ralph indeed
afforded no grounds for quarrelling with
Sir Ralph's daughter, whom her husband at
this time describes as of "unvaried good
humour and behaviour." He admits also
that he has been very comfortable here"
at Seaham, "listening to that monologue
which elderly gentlemen call conversation,
and in which my pious father-in-law repeats
himself every evening,- save one, when he
played the fiddle.” But there were ele-
ments, or rather habits, in Lady Byron's
character less congenial to her lord than
even the music or conversation of Sir Ralph.
She was fully indoctrinated with the duty
of letting all things be done decently and
in order. She could not understand why
an English husband should often go to bed The war waged by society against Byron
when the lark rose; why, in place of devot- was for a time internecine. He, indeed,
ing so many hours to his regular meals, he had first provoked hostilities by disdaining
preferred breakfasting at noon after the concealment of his irregularities, and society
fashion of Jews at the Passover, standing, made its reprisals without inquiry and with-
and with his loins girded; why he was for out measure. The number of his enemies
ever hankering after Mount Olympus, when was legion, for he had not only sinned
their town-house was not a mile from Prim- against virtue, but he had shocked the
rose Hill. Again, Miss Milbanke had been nerves of respectability. The Edinburgh
educated even beyond the standard of Mrs. Review, among other objections to his Hours
Hannah More, as laid down in her once of Idleness, had twitted him with being a
celebrated Letters to a Princess. Besides lord! Society, on its part, cried, "Is it to
all that her governesses and masters taught, be endured that, because a man happens to
she was a deeply-read mathematician. But, be a lord, he should walk in other ways
unluckily, the gods had not made her poet-
ical, and before the honey-or, as her
ladyship's husband termed it, the treacle
moon was over, she casually asked him
"when he meant to give up his idle and
unprofitable habit of making verses?"
Again, Lady Byron, accustomed to all the
comforts and usages of an English home,
naturally looked for them at her married
house in London. Doubtless her husband,
a scarcely-weaned bachelor, was an indiffer-
ent purveyor of the necessary elements of
comfort; and besides he kept strange com-

than those trodden by his class?" Much, doubtless, might be conceded to rank, and some allowance made for genius. Not every excess rouses the noble wrath whether of the lion or the unicorn. Sheridan's addiction to the bottle, Charles Fox's to the gaming-table, the Duke of Norfolk's to turtle and venison, and that of a greater than any of these to Burgundy and bulldogs, were to be deplored, but were not denounced. It is difficult to perceive to what degree Byron's offences against public morals were more flagrant than theirs. Yet

end tutors and masters, study Virgil, Horace, and Aristophanes? The hurricane had swept the sky; then came a calm, and after the calm a season of fair weather; and Byron was again installed as monarch of English poetry,- then, and until his death on the 18th of April, 1824.

We have freely stated our opinion of the defects in the Marchioness de Boissy's volumes, and now turn to the more pleasant office of commending a portion of them. Her pages are never so agreeable as when Byron himself is called into court to give evidence on points connected with his own life. He may not be an unbiassed witness, but he is a communicative and instructive

on him the tower in the social Siloam fell, the banished Harold would be welcome home and the idol of a few London seasons, like again; and the most zealous agitators began a new Sejanus, was dragged from his ped- to ask themselves, not why they had done estal and driven forth from the society which well to be angry, but why they had been he was said to have dishonoured. Our au- angry at all. A second summer arose for thoress cannot be expected to understand his verse; not so bright, but more steady how very thin a partition divides, in this coun- than the first. His poetry, indeed, became try, social patience from social intolerance, rather more than less objectionable than it and she therefore is more surprised and in- had been before the storm; but what of dignant than is perhaps quite necessary at By- that? Was Shakspeare altogether clean, ron's ostracism by respectable Britons. She at least un-Bowdlerised? Were our old is yet more astonished at the obloquy which | dramatists, then returning to favour, manufollowed him across the sea, up the Rhine, als for the young? Did not our young men, and over the Alps. His case was, indeed," under the especial patronage" of revera hard one. "True Jedwood justice," writes Lord Macaulay, "was dealt out to him. First came the execution, then the investigation, and last of all, or rather not at all, the accusation." The Scotch peasants in 1649 fled from their hamlets before the face of Cromwell's ironsides because they had been told that the troopers impaled men alive, tossed children on their pikes, and cut off women's breasts, and they could hardly be brought to believe that these lions in battle were well-conducted lambs in quarters of on march. As atrocious calumnies were uttered against Byron. It was popularly believed that the poet, his own Lara, Alp, and Conrad, had somewhere, and at some time not specified, after expressing one. Struck in early days with the interhis curiosity to know how an assassin might esting and graphic character of Gibbon's feel, gratified his curiosity by a practical journal, he began to keep a diary of his experiment. In this respect, indeed, the studies, thoughts, and all that he did or poet shared the fate of Napoleon. The heard. In addition to this record he was, Emperor, it was alleged, and it was long an fortunately for us, if not always for himself, article of faith in rural halls and rectories, a good correspondent. As a writer of lethad blown up a house in Toulon - by a ters we put him in the very first rank. The slight violation of chronology that house in- hand of the workman is too conspicuous in deed was said to have been his mother-in-Walpole's Letters. The recluse of Olney law's, vile damnum accordingly besides and Weston Underwood had little to tell. having poisoned a girl with arsenic at the Byron, though probably, like Walpole, military school, and renewed the abomina- aware that a letter by him addressed to one tions of Capreæ in the palace of St. Cloud. would be read by many, is the easier of the The newspapers increased their circulation two in his language, and, from his position by recording Childe Harold's iniques; in the world at home, and his yet more intipreachers their congregations and their pew-mate acquaintance with foreign life and rents by enjoining hearers to discard his manners, was master of epistolary wealth writings, and inscribe anathema against his in a degree far beyond the secluded Cowname. Furor arma ministrabat - the pub- per. The authoress has wisely allowed Bylic was in one of its simooms of indignant ron to speak for himself in his letters, and virtue. the extracts from his correspondence are no But the season of inordinate fury was less judiciously supported by biographical brief. The wheel had revolved; respecta- or characteristic passages from his poems. bility was vindicated; scandal was satiated with the garbage it loves, or turned towards less noble victims. The pulpits ceased to illustrate a text or to point a moral at his expense; shilling- and penny-a-liners sheathed their stings; dowagers, matrons, and maidens once more thought themselves secure; repentance followed upon the heels of wrath;

The conversion of his poetry into French prose is not, indeed, to the advantage of the former. No great mischief, however, is done by this process to the English reader, while the junction of his letters and journals with his verse is auxiliary to a just apprehension of the writer of both. The juxtaposition of so many witnesses has this

value. It enables us to collect into one focus the opinions of many, and thus to obtain a tolerably clear view of a not very consistent character.

dential maxims that passed for wisdom during the first twenty years of the present century. The selfish timidity of this period was in somc measure a consequence of the terror inspired in the preceding generation by the French Revolution. In France the foundations of religion and morals, previously sapped by vice and corruption, had been shaken by a social earthquake, and in England it was thought necessary to prevent such a catastrophe, not by solid repairs to the groundwork, but by giving it a good coat of paint.

The view we take of Byron is this, that, like Dryden, most truly and happily termed by Pope "unhappy Dryden," he was capable of better things than he ever accomplished; that he was more sinned against than sinning; that he was alike unfortunate in his early fame, in his temporary disgrace, and in the later circumstances of both his personal and literary career. Unquestioned as were the vigour and harmony of Childe Could a foreign authoress have been acHarold, it betrayed many of the faults of quainted with the society or the literature youthful composition, and the undiscrimi- that existed in Byron's early manhood, she nating applause it called forth reacted upon might have been less surprised than she its author's character. It rendered one who seems to be at the contradiction between his stood much in need of care, careless; it en- first popularity and his sudden fall in public couraged him to brave the collective good esteem. What if he was known to have sense and right feeling of a whole people on done many generous acts? They were not points which cannot be treated with levity performed in the way approved by society. without common injury on both sides. Upon His name did not appear in subscription the great themes of religion, social morality, lists, though his purse was always open to conduct in life, and politics, Byron, at the the needy; he wrote Hebrew Melodies, which early age of twenty-four years, the date of a living critic has pronounced to be "fraught the first two cantos of Childe Harold, had with the spirit of Isaiah," but he did not thought more seriously than two-thirds at subscribe to the "Propagation of the Gosthe very least of his youthful contempora- pel Society;" he abhorred slavery, but he ries, while his experience had been far did not swell the train of Mr. Wilberforce. greater and more manifold than that of He poured forth profusely descriptions of most of the young men who, having passed the glories of foreign lands, but he indulged through school and college, had topped the in none of the sentiments which make Engmuch or the little they had learned in them lishmen "justly proud of their country." by the usual grand tour of Europe. But In his opinions he was a kind of "Hermit he had not deeply probed any one of these in London ". - not one of the smooth and momentous questions, and he often rushed similar people whose verses edify and whose impulsively into subjects that men of double after-dinner speeches delight an approving his age would have feared to enter upon. public. He puzzled people quite as much His verses were applauded by two classes as he delighted them; and, unluckily for of readers, by those possessed of poetic himself, he delighted in puzzling them. sensibility, if not of the "accomplishment But the hero of a season rides and will ever of verse," and by the young, rerum novarum ride with a slave in his triumphal chariot. avidi, whose instincts impel them to over- The golden statue has always a foot of clay. look what is good in old things, and to im- Demus gets tired of its handsome and acagine an El-Dorado in new. The Marchion-complished Alcibiades, and next to the ess's chapters abound with anecdotes of the pleasure of seating him on the throne is the extraordinary effect produced by Byron's pleasure of dragging him off it. Neither poetry upon the young and susceptible of consent of credible witnesses nor zeal in his both sexes. The scenes he described, the champion is able to display Byron in a uniromance with which he clothed his charac- form light. Those who were admitted to ters, the fervency of his nature-worship, the his intimacy concur in their accounts of his occasional freedom of his opinions, were mutability. He was at once silent and selflures and charms of irresistible might for centred, free of speech and affable in deminds unsatisfied with the meagre educa-meanour; at times sad and speculative as tion of that day, and wearied with the con- Hamlet, at times mocking and grotesque as ventional bondage of a society built upon Scarron. Highly generous and benevolent, mere decencies, and shrinking from strong he deemed no sacrifice for others too great; enthusiasm or severe inquiry. It is scarcely yet he delighted in teasing his friends, as possible to apprehend the shock to the children delight in teasing their pets; and nerves of society imparted by the young his correspondence shows him parodying poet unless we take into account the pru-writers whom he highly esteemed, or pen

From The Saturday Review.

NICKNAMES.

ning lampoons on those whom he had praised in verse, or to whom he had dedicated poems. His literary tastes were not more consistent than his personal likings. PHILOSOPHERS might well condescend to He was among the foremost innovators in pay a little more attention than they usually English poetry, and yet a worshipper at the spare to some of the apparently trivial shrine of Pope. There is reason for think-means by which the world is influenced. ing him indifferent to Shakspeare, and They are ready to be eloquent upon the though the poem which made him famous dawning of a new idea in the world, when between bedtime and breakfast was written it comes wrapped in all the pomp of elaborin the Spenserian measure, he could not en- ate histories and disquisitions; but it would dure the Faery Queen. Like Horace Wal- be at least equally important, though doubtpole, he reviled kings, yet there are few less far more difficult, to mark the time at symptoms of admiration in his writings for which it wins the acceptance of great mas"King Mob;" he often satirized his own ses of mankind. The threadbare compariorder, and yet he was proud of his Norman son between the influence of laws and that blood. He was consistent indeed in his of songs upon a people is the ordinary inlove for Shelley and Moore, and the strokes stance of the truth. When, for example, he most severely felt were those caused the French mob began to sing the Marseilby the early deaths of his school and col- laise, they had entered into the spirit of the lege friends. Shelley, by his scholarship, Revolution. And what a song is to a polihis imaginative power, and his metaphysical speculations, inspired him with a kind of awe, which did not, however, interfere with genuine affection. Moore's society and correspondence afforded him unmixed and unfailing delight. Neither was there any variableness in his demeanour to dependents. He knew their worth as well as he knew that of the parasites who sunned themselves in his favour. To Fletcher and Tita he was a kind and equable master; he played with, according to their deserts, the Medwins and Polidoris of his retinue.

Our opinion of Byron is confirmed by the volumes which we now close, but it has not been formed upon them. For the statement of that opinion we will employ the testimony of one who knew him well, who deplored, while he judged charitably, his many failings, and who recognised in him, what less accurate observers missed, the presence and the activity of many virtues. In the following lines of Samuel Rogers we find the proper epitaph of George Gordon, Lord Byron:

He is now at rest:

And praise and blame fall on his ear alike,
Now dull in death. Yes, Byron, thou art gone;
Gone like a star that through the firmament
Shot and was lost, in its eccentric course
Dazzling, perplexing. Yet thy heart, methinks,
Was generous, noble - noble in its scorn
Of all things low or little; nothing there
Sordid or servile. If imagined wrongs
Pursued thee, urging thee sometimes to do
Things long regretted, oft, as many know,
None more than I, thy gratitude would build
On slight foundations; and, if in thy life
Not happy, in y death thou surely wert,
Thy wish accomplished; dying in the land
Where thy young mind had caught ethereal fire;
Dying in Greece, and in a cause so glorious!

tical essay, a nickname is to a song. The idea to which it corresponds has become so familiar that it can be packed into a single word, without requiring even a verse of explanation. The party which can obtain currency for its coinage of phrases must have obtained a considerable ascendancy. There were Whigs and Tories in England before the names were invented, but the invention brought them at once into distinct opposition. The discovery of the nickname acted like the electric current which decomposes a chemical mixture, the rival elements were there, but they had not crystallized into distinct and separate shapes. Such nicknames arise, as a rule, so spontaneously that no particular person can claim the glory of the invention; some old word, perhaps, has lain in long concealment till it is suddenly torn from its obscurity to become familiar in every mouth. "Skedaddle," for example, must have been smouldering, as it were, in some corner of America until the crisis arose which imperatively required its use. It expressed with such delicacy the peculiar shade of cynical indifference in which the Yankee soldier ran away for the time when he knew that he was beaten, subject to the full intention of fighting another day, that it must have been discovered, if not invented, by a man of genius. Some mute inglorious Milton must have existed to put into three hitherto neglected syllables that precise meaning which we should vainly endeavour to analyse in many sentences. How it is that words, previously unknown, are capable of summoning to every one's mind such complex combinations of ideas is a profound mystery; but it is the peculiar prerogative of the poet to perceive by immediate intuition the particular set of sounds

which will produce the desired effect upon corns, and move him to an inarticulate sense the mind. To account for the influence ex- of indignation. Unluckily, he cannot say ercised by a single verse or a single epithet what are the particular offensive qualities; is as impossible as to explain why certain he is like a man suffering from some undecombinations of colours or of musical termined disorder who will be much obliged sounds produce an exquisite pleasure. To take another trivial instance, every one knows that certain of his friends are doomed to be known by a nickname; at the period of life when the faculty of word-making is still in full activity all the acquaintances of such persons are long in labour to hit off the required appellation; suddenly it comes by a flash of inspiration, and it is felt that it would be impossible ever to think of the victim without his appropriate headmark. Why it should be that one man, whatever his godfathers and godmothers may have intended, should be always and inevitably called "Jack," is, as before, an unfathomable mystery. If we could fully solve it, we might understand the great problem of the origin of language; meanwhile we can only conjecture dimly that either something about the sound itself, or about its use in other instances, has invested it with a set of dim associations which cause it to be a descriptive term as well as a mere sound.

to the doctor who will give it a name, even though the name tells him next to nothing as to its nature. When the genius arises who describes our hitherto unknown enemies by a common name, we have at least the great pleasure of possessing a new abusive epithet. An immense progress, for example, was made in social morality when Mr. Thackeray gave to the word "snob" a new and hitherto unused significance. We had all been familiar with snobs in our daily life, and not a few of us, it may be presumed, had been in our own persons very fair examples of the race. But any one who wished to denounce snobbish actions had been obliged to resort to vague and unsatisfactory circumlocutions. He could not say in a single syllable, You are a person with a disposition to cringe meanly before persons who are your social superiors; you are given to ape with inferior means the manners and customs of another class, and simply to make yourself ridiculous for your It is easy to understand the immense im- pains; you have the soul of a flunkey, and portance so often attributed to nicknames. of a flunkey who does not know his proper Without language the reasoning faculty place; you are like Major Ponto, and your must be in a rudimentary state; and with- proper idol should be George IV. To say out the power of inventing new names with all this would be as little satisfactory as to a capacity for sticking, all the outlines of affix to a man a zoological description of party creeds would remain vague and fluc- the animal, instead of directly calling him tuating. You cannot properly hate a man an ass. The last new name which has beof different opinions from your own till you come popular is due to Mr. Matthew Arhave labelled him with some unpleasant nold, and it shows some of the weak points epithet. In theological debates, a heretic which belong to the system. Within a year may be defined as a man with a nickname. or two everybody has awakened to the fact Till we have succeeded in fixing a name that there flourishes amongst us a hitherto upon him, he is confounded amongst the undescribed monster called a Philistine. It general mass of the orthodox; his peculiar- has been a very convenient term, at the ities are presumably not sufficient to con- moment when Englishmen were rousing stitute him into a separate species. In themselves to acknowledge the startling fact American politics, it is said that the success that they were not in all respects the wisest of the Republican party was determined in and best of mankind. The name summed great measure by its name. There was up very fairly the stupidity and narrow pronothing attractive to the ordinary_mind vincialism which is so prevalent amongst about such names as a Whig or a Know- our glorious middle-classes, and it was just nothing; but every American would of as well that they should discover that in course be pleased to call himself a Republi- certain respects they are so offensive to incan, though nobody could imagine that the telligent persons that they require a special points at issue were really described by the epithet to give vent to the accumulated feelordinary senses of Democracy and Repub-ings of disgust which they had provoked. licanism. But the high art of giving nick- The use of a nickname resembles in this renames comes out in describing more deli- spect the use of an oath. It is, as it were, cate shades of difference. Everybody is an embodied snort; it is an expressive gesconscious of a number of vague social an- ture of contempt, sufficiently pointed to tipathies; he meets a number of persons pierce in some degree the thick hide of a who, somehow or other, jar upon his sensi- stupid antagonist. Even the most pig. bilities; they tread upon his tenderest | headed vestryman.feels that something un