The pride of birth was a feeling common alike to mother and son, and, at times, even became a point of rivalry between them, from their respective claims, English and Scotch, to high lineage.  In a letter written by him from Italy, referring to some anecdote which his mother had told him, he says,—­“My mother, who was as haughty as Lucifer with her descent from the Stuarts, and her right line from the old Gordons,—­not the Seyton Gordons, as she disdainfully termed the ducal branch,—­told me the story, always reminding me how superior her Gordons were to the southern Byrons, notwithstanding our Norman, and always masculine, descent, which has never lapsed into a female, as my mother’s Gordons had done in her own person.”

If, to be able to depict powerfully the painful emotions, it is necessary first to have experienced them, or, in other words, if, for the poet to be great, the man must suffer, Lord Byron, it must be owned, paid early this dear price of mastery.  Few as were the ties by which his affections held, whether within or without the circle of relationship, he was now doomed, within a short space, to see the most of them swept away by death.[17] Besides the loss of his mother, he had to mourn over, in quick succession, the untimely fatalities that carried off, within a few weeks of each other, two or three of his most loved and valued friends.  “In the short space of one month,” he says, in a note on Childe Harold, “I have lost her who gave me being, and most of those who made that being tolerable."[18] Of these young Wingfield, whom we have seen high on the list of his Harrow favourites, died of a fever at Coimbra; and Matthews, the idol of his admiration at college, was drowned while bathing in the waters of the Cam.

The following letter, written immediately after the latter event, bears the impress of strong and even agonised feeling, to such a degree as renders it almost painful to read it:—­

LETTER 56.  TO MR. SCROPE DAVIES.

     “Newstead Abbey, August 7. 1811.

     “My dearest Davies,

“Some curse hangs over me and mine.  My mother lies a corpse in this house; one of my best friends is drowned in a ditch.  What can I say, or think, or do?  I received a letter from him the day before yesterday.  My dear Scrope, if you can spare a moment, do come down to me—­I want a friend.  Matthews’s last letter was written on Friday,—­on Saturday he was not.  In ability, who was like Matthews?  How did we all shrink before him?  You do me but justice in saying, I would have risked my paltry existence to have preserved his.  This very evening did I mean to write, inviting him, as I invite you, my very dear friend, to visit me.  God forgive * * * for his apathy!  What will our poor Hobhouse feel?  His letters breathe but or Matthews.  Come to me, Scrope, I am almost desolate—­left almost alone in the world—­I had but you, and H., and M., and let me enjoy the survivors whilst I can.  Poor M., in his letter of Friday, speaks of his intended contest for Cambridge[19], and a speedy journey to London.  Write or come, but come if you can, or one or both.

     “Yours ever.”