in dealing them, and by which he more than recovered his former station in his own esteem.  In truth, the versatility and ease with which, as shall presently be shown, he could, on the briefest consideration, shift from praise to censure, and, sometimes, almost as rapidly, from censure to praise, shows how fanciful and transient were the impressions under which he, in many instances, pronounced his judgments; and though it may in some degree deduct from the weight of his eulogy, absolves him also from any great depth of malice in his Satire.

His coming of age, in 1809, was celebrated at Newstead by such festivities as his narrow means and society could furnish.  Besides the ritual roasting of an ox, there was a ball, it seems, given on the occasion,—­of which the only particular I could collect, from the old domestic who mentioned it, was, that Mr. Hanson, the agent of her lord, was among the dancers.  Of Lord Byron’s own method of commemorating the day, I find the following curious record in a letter written from Genoa in 1822:—­“Did I ever tell you that the day I came of age I dined on eggs and bacon and a bottle of ale?—­For once in a way they are my favourite dish and drinkable; but as neither of them agree with me, I never use them but on great jubilees,—­in four or five years or so.”  The pecuniary supplies necessary towards his outset, at this epoch, were procured from money-lenders at an enormously usurious interest, the payment of which for a long time continued to be a burden to him.

It was not till the beginning of this year that he took his Satire,—­in a state ready, as he thought, for publication,—­to London.  Before, however, he had put the work to press, new food was unluckily furnished to his spleen by the neglect with which he conceived himself to have been treated by his guardian, Lord Carlisle.  The relations between this nobleman and his ward had, at no time, been of such a nature as to afford opportunities for the cultivation of much friendliness on either side; and to the temper and influence of Mrs. Byron must mainly be attributed the blame of widening, if not of producing, this estrangement between them.  The coldness with which Lord Carlisle had received the dedication of the young poet’s first volume was, as we have seen from one of the letters of the latter, felt by him most deeply.  He, however, allowed himself to be so far governed by prudential considerations as not only to stifle this displeasure, but even to introduce into his Satire, as originally intended for the press, the following compliment to his guardian:—­

    “On one alone Apollo deigns to smile,
     And crowns a new Roscommon in Carlisle.”