Of Mrs. Byron, sufficient, perhaps, has been related in these pages to enable the reader to form fully his own opinion, as well with respect to the character of this lady herself, as to the degree of influence her temper and conduct may have exercised on those of her son.  It was said by one of the most extraordinary of men[16],—­who was himself, as he avowed, principally indebted to maternal culture for the unexampled elevation to which he subsequently rose,—­that “the future good or bad conduct of a child depends entirely on the mother.”  How far the leaven that sometimes mixed itself with the better nature of Byron,—­his uncertain and wayward impulses,—­his defiance of restraint,—­the occasional bitterness of his hate, and the precipitance of his resentments,—­may have had their origin in his early collisions with maternal caprice and violence, is an enquiry for which sufficient materials have been, perhaps, furnished in these pages, but which every one will decide upon, according to the more or less weight he may attribute to the influence of such causes on the formation of character.

That, notwithstanding her injudicious and coarse treatment of him, Mrs. Byron loved her son, with that sort of fitful fondness of which alone such a nature is capable, there can be little doubt,—­and still less, that she was ambitiously proud of him.  Her anxiety for the success of his first literary essays may be collected from the pains which he so considerately took to tranquillise her on the appearance of the hostile article in the Review.  As his fame began to brighten, that notion of his future greatness and glory, which, by a singular forecast of superstition, she had entertained from his very childhood, became proportionably confirmed.  Every mention of him in print was watched by her with eagerness; and she had got bound together in a volume, which a friend of mine once saw, a collection of all the literary notices, that had then appeared, of his early Poems and Satire,—­written over on the margin, with observations of her own, which to my informant appeared indicative of much more sense and ability than, from her general character, we should be inclined to attribute to her.

Among those lesser traits of his conduct through which an observer can trace a filial wish to uphold, and throw respect around, the station of his mother, may be mentioned his insisting, while a boy, on being called “George Byron Gordon”—­giving thereby precedence to the maternal name,—­and his continuing, to the last, to address her as “the Honourable Mrs. Byron,”—­a mark of rank to which, he must have been aware, she had no claim whatever.  Neither does it appear that, in his habitual manner towards her, there was any thing denoting a want of either affection or deference,—­with the exception, perhaps, occasionally, of a somewhat greater degree of familiarity than comports with the ordinary notions of filial respect.  Thus, the usual name he called her by, when they were on good-humoured terms together, was “Kitty Gordon;” and I have heard an eye-witness of the scene describe the look of arch, dramatic humour, with which, one day, at Southwell, when they were in the height of their theatrical rage, he threw open the door of the drawing-room, to admit his mother, saying, at the same time, “Enter the Honourable Kitty.”