for her partner (as often happens at Matlock) some person with whom she was wholly unacquainted, on her resuming her seat, Byron said to her pettishly, “I hope you like your friend?” The words were scarce out of his lips when he was accosted by an ungainly-looking Scotch lady, who rather boisterously claimed him as “cousin,” and was putting his pride to the torture with her vulgarity, when he heard the voice of his fair companion retorting archly in his ear, “I hope you like your friend?”

His time at Annesley was mostly passed in riding with Miss Chaworth and her cousin, sitting in idle reverie, as was his custom, pulling at his handkerchief, or in firing at a door which opens upon the terrace, and which still, I believe, bears the marks of his shots.  But his chief delight was in sitting to hear Miss Chaworth play; and the pretty Welsh air, “Mary Anne,” was (partly, of course, on account of the name) his especial favourite.  During all this time he had the pain of knowing that the heart of her he loved was occupied by another;—­that, as he himself expresses it,

    “Her sighs were not for him; to her he was
    Even as a brother—­but no more.”

Neither is it, indeed, probable, had even her affections been disengaged, that Lord Byron would, at this time, have been selected as the object of them.  A seniority of two years gives to a girl, “on the eve of womanhood,” an advance into life with which the boy keeps no proportionate pace.  Miss Chaworth looked upon Byron as a mere school-boy.  He was in his manners, too, at that period, rough and odd, and (as I have heard from more than one quarter) by no means popular among girls of his own age.  If, at any moment, however, he had flattered himself with the hope of being loved by her, a circumstance mentioned in his “Memoranda,” as one of the most painful of those humiliations to which the defect in his foot had exposed him, must have let the truth in, with dreadful certainty, upon his heart.  He either was told of, or overheard, Miss Chaworth saying to her maid, “Do you think I could care any thing for that lame boy?” This speech, as he himself described it, was like a shot through his heart.  Though late at night when he heard it, he instantly darted out of the house, and scarcely knowing whither he ran, never stopped till he found himself at Newstead.

The picture which he has drawn of his youthful love, in one of the most interesting of his poems, “The Dream,” shows how genius and feeling can elevate the realities of this life, and give to the commonest events and objects an undying lustre.  The old hall at Annesley, under the name of “the antique oratory,” will long call up to fancy the “maiden and the youth” who once stood in it:  while the image of the “lover’s steed,” though suggested by the unromantic race-ground of Nottingham, will not the less conduce to the general charm of the scene, and share a portion of that light which only genius could shed over it.