292 A Mystery for the Byron-Critics. [MARCH, 



having a remarkable application to his own case and dispositions, were 

 calculated to make a strong impression upon the ardent mind of the 

 noble poet. The principal character in " The Three Brothers/' is a way- 

 ward and high-spirited youth, the son of a man of bad passions and most 

 questionable morals (vide Byron's father), and born under circumstances 

 of melancholy and mystic presage as to his fate in life. The boy is 

 beautiful both in face and person, and " his constitution was so instinct 

 with love, that he almost was insensible to an inferior feeling for woman- 

 kind ; and when his eighth year was yet incomplete, he affected and 

 amazed his auditors with the inimitable tenderness of his reply to a 

 young lady who, amusing herself with him, inquired of him what it was 

 to love, answered, ' It is to die in yourself to live in another.' " (vol. iv. 

 p. 254.) By an accident, when with his parents previous to this, the 

 boy's spine is broken, and he is at the same time wounded in the shoulder 

 by a ball from a pistol, which causes a deformity in the back. This 

 misfortune, by destroying the beauty of his form and making him re- 

 markable, and often an object of ridicule to companions otherwise his 

 inferiors, sours his disposition as well as disappoints his romantic fancies, 

 until becoming the mental slave of his unsightly hump, he begins to 

 regard it as the grand cause of all the miseries which he is destined to 

 suffer, and the bitter occasion of incessant self- contempt. The power with 

 which the author of the romance unfolds and illustrates the consequences 

 of this deformity, need not be here dwelt upon ; but when we know 

 how excessively sensitive Byron was all his life upon the subject of his 

 mis-shapen foot how bitterly, and probably unforgivingly, he brooded 

 over the unreasonable and unfeeling taunt of his motner upon the 

 dreaded subject and how this personal deformity, slight as it was, made 

 him remarkable among his companions, and became connected after- 

 wards with the one great disappointment of his life we may have some 

 idea of the impression that every thing in these volumes would make 

 upon a mind like his, narrating as it does so many circumstances, and 

 evolving so many feelings, which spoke so home to his own experience. 

 When we further reflect, that he regarded his early disappointment con- 

 cerning Miss Chaworth, as the great event which had not only shaped 

 his after life to misfortune and suffering, but which had, in some sense, 

 disturbed his faculties (Moore, vol. ii. p. 790, notes), we shall see of what 

 importance the impressions given by this congenial romance may have 

 been, in forming the tone, if not the conceptions of his maturer mind. 

 The manner in which Byron afterwards speaks of Miss Chaworth's refusal 

 of him, and marriage with another, is most affecting. " A marriage," 

 he says, " for which she sacrificed the prospects of two very ancient 

 families, and a heart which was her's from ten years old, and a head 

 which has never been quite right since." (ib.) And to what does he in 

 his own " Memoranda" ascribe this irremediable disappointment ? It 

 will be recollected that, in his delightful intercourse with this young 

 lady, there were constant dances in the evening at Matlock, in which, 

 being unable to join on account of his lame foot, he had the pain of 

 being obliged to sit looking on, " solitary and mortified," while his idol 

 was handed round caressingly by another. He afterwards had the 

 further pain to understand fully that he had no share in her heart. 

 " One of the inost painful of those humiliations/' says Mr. Moore, " to 

 which the defect in his foot had exposed him, must have let the truth 

 in, with dreadful certainty, upon his heart. He either was told of, or 



