LETTER 31.

TO MRS. BYRON.

“Newstead Abbey, November 2. 1808.

“Dear Mother,

“If you please, we will forget the things you mention.  I have no desire to remember them.  When my rooms are finished, I shall be happy to see you; as I tell but the truth, you will not suspect me of evasion.  I am furnishing the house more for you than myself, and I shall establish you in it before I sail for India, which I expect to do in March, if nothing particularly obstructive occurs.  I am now fitting up the green drawing-room; the red for a bed-room, and the rooms over as sleeping-rooms.  They will be soon completed;—­at least I hope so.

“I wish you would enquire of Major Watson (who is an old Indian) what things will be necessary to provide for my voyage.  I have already procured a friend to write to the Arabic Professor at Cambridge, for some information I am anxious to procure.  I can easily get letters from government to the ambassadors, consuls, &c., and also to the governors at Calcutta and Madras.  I shall place my property and my will in the hands of trustees till my return, and I mean to appoint you one.  From H——­ I have heard nothing—­when I do, you shall have the particulars.

“After all, you must own my project is not a bad one.  If I do not travel now, I never shall, and all men should one day or other.  I have at present no connections to keep me at home; no wife, or unprovided sisters, brothers, &c.  I shall take care of you, and when I return I may possibly become a politician.  A few years’ knowledge of other countries than our own will not incapacitate me for that part.  If we see no nation but our own, we do not give mankind a fair chance:—­it is from experience, not books, we ought to judge of them.  There is nothing like inspection, and trusting to our own senses.

“Yours,” &c.

In the November of this year he lost his favourite dog, Boatswain,—­the poor animal having been seized with a fit of madness, at the commencement of which so little aware was Lord Byron of the nature of the malady, that he more than once, with his bare hand, wiped away the slaver from the dog’s lips during the paroxysms.  In a letter to his friend, Mr. Hodgson,[96] he thus announces this event:—­“Boatswain is dead!—­he expired in a state of madness on the 18th, after suffering much, yet retaining all the gentleness of his nature to the last, never attempting to do the least injury to any one near him.  I have now lost every thing except old Murray.”

The monument raised by him to this dog,—­the most memorable tribute of the kind, since the Dog’s Grave, of old, at Salamis,—­is still a conspicuous ornament of the gardens of Newstead.  The misanthropic verses engraved upon it may be found among his poems, and the following is the inscription by which they are introduced:—­