186 Moore' f Notices of Lord Byron. FEB, 



stories of his insane violence. He let his house go to ruin, endeavoured 

 to dilapidate the family estate, and died, with the popular impression of 

 his having gone straight to Erebus. 



Lord Byron having now become a ward in Chancery, the Earl of 

 Carlisle, the husband of the deceased lord's sister, was appointed his 

 guardian. It was an uneasy guardianship for the unfortunate Earl. 

 Mrs. Byron was a virago, who flew into paroxysms of fury on the 

 slightest contradiction, and with whom the earl was obliged to draw an 

 immediate line of demarcation. The young lord availed himself of 

 the first use of his pen to fix him conspicuously in a lampoon. 



The biographer's anecdotes of the scenes between the son and the 

 mother, are sufficiently extraordinary. Mrs. Byron, in her rage, was in 

 the habit of flinging the poker and tongs at the head of the young dis- 

 putant ; and the hostility at length became so deadly, that an instance 

 occurred, in which " they were known each to go privately, after one of 

 those nights of dispute, to the apothecary's, anxiously inquiring whether 

 the other had gone to purchase poison !" After an uneasy sojourn at 

 Harrow, he went to Cambridge, where he amused himself according to 

 his whim ; bred up a bear, which he pronounced that he kept to sit for 

 a fellowship ; and published his first volume of poems by a " Minor." 



Here his life was like that of his contemporaries, and he suitably 

 begins one of his letters with " My dear Elizabeth : Fatigued with 

 sitting up till four in the morning, for the last two days at Hazard, I 

 take up my pen." Moore in his note animadverts upon " that sort of 

 display and boast of rakishness, which is but too common a folly at this 

 period of life. Unluckily, this boyish desire of being thought worse than 

 he really was, remained with Lord Byron, as did some other failings and 

 foibles of his boyhood, long after the period when with others they are 

 past and forgotten." 



Byron's description of Cambridge in this letter is emphatic enough. 

 " A villainous chaos of dice and drunkenness, nothing but hazard and 

 Burgundy, hunting, mathematics and Newmarket, riot and racing." 



His tastes for adventure had now begun to take a form. " Next January, 

 (but this is entre nous, for my maternal persecutor will be for throwing 

 her tomahawk at any of my curious projects) I am going to, sea for four 

 or five months, with my cousin, Captain Bettesworth, who commands the 

 Tartar, the finest frigate in the navy. I have seen most scenes, and long 

 to look at a naval life. We are going probably to the Mediterranean, or 

 to the West Indies, or to the d 1." He finishes the letter by saying, 

 that he has " written the first volume of a novel, and a poem of 380 

 lines," which formed the ground work of the "" English Bards and 

 Scotch Reviewers." The satire thus having been written before the 

 affront, though probably some additional pungencies were thrown into 

 its enlarged shape. 



In his visits to London, about 1808, he became acquainted with the 

 Mr. Dallas, of whom we have heard so much in the noble Lord's deal- 

 ings with Murray. Dallas seems to have made his way by giving him 

 opinions of his " Minor" poems, and to have tried to turn his influence to 

 advantage, by lecturing him, probably with sincerity, upon the bard's 

 absurdities in scepticism. But Byron asked no higher opportunity than 

 to make the most of his infidel fame, and he loaded his adviser with letters 

 full of the most daring nonsense, for the purpose, as Moore says, of 

 astounding his adviser. He thus prefers " Socrates to St. Paul, and Con- 



