of Byron, whose genius, in some respects less genuine, was indefinitely and inevitably wider.  His intensely susceptible nature took a dye from every scene, city, and society through which he passed; but to the last he bore with him the marks of a descendant of the Sea-Kings, and of the mad Gordons in whose domains he had first learned to listen to the sound of the “two mighty voices” that haunted and inspired him through life.

In the autumn of 1798 the family, i.e. his mother—­who had sold the whole of her household furniture for 75 l—­with himself, and a maid, set south.  The poet’s only recorded impression of the journey is a gleam of Loch Leven, to which he refers in one of his latest letters.  He never revisited the land of his childhood.  Our next glimpse of him is on his passing the toll-bar of Newstead.  Mrs. Byron asked the old woman who kept it, “Who is the next heir?” and on her answer “They say it is a little boy who lives at Aberdeen,” “This is he, bless him!” exclaimed the nurse.

Returned to the ancestral Abbey, and finding it half ruined and desolate, they migrated for a time to the neighbouring Nottingham.  Here the child’s first experience was another course of surgical torture.  He was placed under the charge of a quack named Lavender, who rubbed his foot in oil, and screwed it about in wooden machines.  This useless treatment is associated with two characteristic anecdotes.  One relates to the endurance which Byron, on every occasion of mere physical trial, was capable of displaying.  Mr. Rogers, a private tutor, with whom he was reading passages of Virgil and Cicero, remarked, “It makes me uncomfortable, my lord, to see you sitting them in such pain as I know you must be suffering.”  “Never mind, Mr. Rogers.” said the child, “you shall not see any signs of it in me.”  The other illustrates his precocious delight in detecting imposture.  Having scribbled on 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.