Byron | Page 9

a piece of paper
several lines of mere gibberish, he brought them to Lavender, and
gravely asked what language it was; and on receiving the answer "It is

Italian," he broke into an exultant laugh at the expense of his tormentor.
Another story survives, of his vindictive spirit giving birth to his first
rhymes. A meddling old lady, who used to visit his mother and was
possessed of a curious belief in a future transmigration to our
satellite--the bleakness of whose scenery she had not realized--having
given him some cause of offence, he stormed out to his nurse that he
"could not bear the sight of the witch," and vented his wrath in the
quatrain.--
In Nottingham county there lives, at Swan Green, As curst an old lady
as ever was seen; And when she does die, which I hope will be soon,
She firmly believes she will go to the moon.
The poet himself dates his "first dash into poetry" a year later (1800),
from his juvenile passion for his cousin Margaret Parker, whose
subsequent death from an injury caused by a fall he afterwards deplored
in a forgotten elegy. "I do not recollect," he writes through the
transfiguring mists of memory, "anything equal to the transparent
beauty of my cousin, or to the sweetness of her temper, during the short
period of our intimacy. She looked as if she had been made out of a
rainbow--all beauty and peace. My passion had the usual effects upon
me--I could not sleep; I could not eat; I could not rest. It was the texture
of my life to think of the time that must elapse before we could meet
again. But I was a fool then, and not much wiser now." Sic transit
secunda.
The departure at a somewhat earlier date of May Gray for her native
country, gave rise to evidence of another kind of affection. On her
leaving he presented her with his first watch, and a miniature by Kay of
Edinburgh, representing him with a bow and arrow in his hand and a
profusion of hair over his shoulders. He continued to correspond with
her at intervals. Byron was always beloved by his servants. This nurse
afterwards married well, and during her last illness, in 1827,
communicated to her attendant, Dr. Ewing of Aberdeen, recollections
of the poet, from which his biographers have drawn.
In the summer of 1799 he was sent to London, entrusted to the medical
care of Dr. Baillie (brother of Joanna, the dramatist), and placed in a

boarding school at Dulwich, under the charge of Dr. Glennie. The
physician advised a moderation in athletic sports, which the patient in
his hours of liberty was constantly apt to exceed. The teacher--who
continued to cherish an affectionate remembrance of his pupil, even
when he was told, on a visit to Geneva in 1817, that, he ought to have
"made a better boy of him"--testifies to the alacrity with which he
entered on his tasks, his playful good-humour with his comrades, his
reading in history beyond his age, and his intimate acquaintance with
the Scriptures. "In my study," he states, "he found many books open to
him; among others, a set of our poets from Chaucer to Churchill, which
I am almost tempted to say he had more than once perused from
beginning to end." One of the books referred to was the Narrative of
the Shipwreck of the "Juno," which contains, almost word for word, the
account of the "two fathers," in Don Juan. Meanwhile Mrs.
Byron,--whose reduced income had been opportunely augmented by a
grant of a 300l. annuity from the Civil List,--after revisiting Newstead
followed her son to London, and took up her residence in a house in
Sloane-terrace. She was in the habit of having him with her there from
Saturday to Monday, kept him from school for weeks, introduced him
to idle company, and in other ways was continually hampering his
progress.
Byron on his accession to the peerage having become a ward in
Chancery, was handed over by the Court to the guardianship of Lord
Carlisle, nephew of the admiral, and son of the grand aunt of the poet.
Like his mother this Earl aspired to be a poet, and his tragedy, The
Father's Revenge, received some commendation from Dr. Johnson; but
his relations with his illustrious kinsman were from the first
unsatisfactory. In answer to Dr. Glennie's appeal, he exerted his
authority against the interruptions to his ward's education; but the
attempt to mend matters led to such outrageous exhibitions of temper
that he said to the master, "I can have nothing more to do with Mrs.
Byron; you must now manage her as you can." Finally, after two years
of work, which she had done her best to mar, she