Lady Byron did not, however, fulfill her purpose of prefacing the contemplated edition of Byron’s poems with a notice of him by herself, which I think very likely to have been a suggestion of Mr. Robertson’s to her.

My happy year in Edinburgh ended, I returned to London, to our house in James Street, Buckingham Gate, where I found my parents much burdened with care and anxiety about the affairs of the theater, which were rapidly falling into irretrievable embarrassment.  My father toiled incessantly, but the tide of ill-success and losing fortune had set steadily against him, and the attempt to stem it became daily harder and more hopeless.  I used sometimes to hear some of the sorrowful details of this dreary struggle, and I well remember the indignation and terror I experienced when one day my father said at dinner, “I have had a new experience to-day:  I have been arrested for the first time in my life.”  I believe my father was never personally in debt during all his life; he said he never had been up to that day, and I am very sure he never was afterward.  Through all the severe labor of his professional life, and his strenuous exertions to maintain his family and educate my brothers like gentlemen, and my sister and myself with every advantage, he never incurred the misery of falling into debt, but paid his way as he went along, with difficulty, no doubt, but still steadily and successfully, “owing no man any thing.”  But the suit in question was brought against him as one of the proprietors of the theater, for a debt which the theater owed; and, moreover, was that of a person whom he had befriended and helped forward, and who had always professed the most sincere gratitude and attachment to him.  The constantly darkening prospects of that unlucky theater threw a gloom over us all; sometimes my father used to speak of selling his share in it for any thing he could get for it (and Heaven knows it was not likely to be much!), and going to live abroad; or sending my mother, with us, to live cheaply in the south of France, while he continued to work in London.  Neither alternative was cheerful for him or my poor mother, and I felt very sorrowful for them, though I thought I should like living in the south of France better than in London.  I was working with a good deal of enthusiasm at a tragedy on the subject of Fiesco, the Genoese noble’s conspiracy against the Dorias—­a subject which had made a great impression upon me when I first read Schiller’s noble play upon it.  My own former fancy about going on the stage, and passionate desire for a lonely, independent life in which it had originated, had died away with the sort of moral and mental effervescence which had subsided during my year’s residence in Edinburgh.  Although all my sympathy with the anxieties of my parents tended to make the theater an object of painful interest to me, and though my own attempts at poetical composition were constantly cast in a dramatic form, in spite