querulous satirist.  But, as his views opened on a freer and wider horizon, every feeling of his nature kept pace with their enlargement; and this inborn sadness, mingling itself with the effusions of his genius, became one of the chief constituent charms not only of their pathos, but their grandeur.  For, when did ever a sublime thought spring up in the soul, that melancholy was not to be found, however latent, in its neighbourhood?

We have seen, from the letters written by him on his passage homeward, how far from cheerful or happy was the state of mind in which he returned.  In truth, even for a disposition of the most sanguine cast, there was quite enough in the discomforts that now awaited him in England, to sadden its hopes, and check its buoyancy.  “To be happy at home,” says Johnson, “is the ultimate result of all ambition, the end to which every enterprise and labour tends.”  But Lord Byron had no home,—­at least none that deserved this endearing name.  A fond family circle, to accompany him with its prayers, while away, and draw round him, with listening eagerness, on his return, was what, unluckily, he never knew, though with a heart, as we have seen, by nature formed for it.  In the absence, too, of all that might cheer and sustain, he had every thing to encounter that could distress and humiliate.  To the dreariness of a home without affection, was added the burden of an establishment without means; and he had thus all the embarrassments of domestic life, without its charms.  His affairs had, during his absence, been suffered to fall into confusion, even greater than their inherent tendency to such a state warranted.  There had been, the preceding year, an execution on Newstead, for a debt of 1500_l._ owing to the Messrs. Brothers, upholsterers; and a circumstance told of the veteran, Joe Murray, on this occasion, well deserves to be mentioned.  To this faithful old servant, jealous of the ancient honour of the Byrons, the sight of the notice of sale, pasted up on the abbey-door, could not be otherwise than an unsightly and intolerable nuisance.  Having enough, however, of the fear of the law before his eyes, not to tear the writing down, he was at last forced, as his only consolatory expedient, to paste a large piece of brown paper over it.

Notwithstanding the resolution, so recently expressed by Lord Byron, to abandon for ever the vocation of authorship, and leave “the whole Castalian state” to others, he was hardly landed in England when we find him busily engaged in preparations for the publication of some of the poems which he had produced abroad.  So eager was he, indeed, to print, that he had already, in a letter written at sea, announced himself to Mr. Dallas, as ready for the press.  Of this letter, which, from its date, ought to have preceded some of the others that have been given, I shall here lay before the reader the most material parts.

[Footnote 1:  To this he alludes in those beautiful stanzas,