I remain your affectionate friend,

“BYRON.”

“P.S.  If you think proper to send me any answer to this, I shall be extremely happy to receive it.  Adieu.

“P.S. 2d.  As you say you are a novice in the art of knitting, I hope it don’t give you too much trouble.  Go on slowly, but surely.  Once more, adieu.”

We shall often have occasion to remark the fidelity to early habits and tastes by which Lord Byron, though in other respects so versatile, was distinguished.  In the juvenile letter, just cited, there are two characteristics of this kind which he preserved unaltered during the remainder of his life;—­namely, his punctuality in immediately answering letters, and his love of the simplest ballad music.  Among the chief favourites to which this latter taste led him at this time were the songs of the Duenna, which he had the good taste to delight in; and some of his Harrow contemporaries still remember the joyousness with which, when dining with his friends at the memorable mother Barnard’s, he used to roar out, “This bottle’s the sun of our table.”

His visit to Southwell this summer was interrupted, about the beginning of August, by one of those explosions of temper on the part of Mrs. Byron, to which, from his earliest childhood, he had been but too well accustomed, and in producing which his own rebel spirit was not always, it may be supposed, entirely blameless.  In all his portraits of himself, so dark is the pencil which he employs, that the following account of his own temper, from one of his journals, must be taken with a due portion of that allowance for exaggeration, which his style of self-portraiture, “overshadowing even the shade,” requires.

“In all other respects,” (he says, after mentioning his infant passion for Mary Duff,) “I differed not at all from other children, being neither tall nor short, dull nor witty, of my age, but rather lively—­except in my sullen moods, and then I was always a Devil.  They once (in one of my silent rages) wrenched a knife from me, which I had snatched from table at Mrs. B.’s dinner (I always dined earlier), and applied to my breast;—­but this was three or four years after, just before the late Lord B.’s decease.

“My ostensible temper has certainly improved in later years; but I shudder, and must, to my latest hour, regret the consequence of it and my passions combined.  One event—­but no matter—­there are others not much better to think of also—­and to them I give the preference....

“But I hate dwelling upon incidents.  My temper is now under management—­rarely loud, and when loud, never deadly.  It is when silent, and I feel my forehead and my cheek paling, that I cannot control it; and then.... but unless there is a woman (and not any or every woman) in the way, I have sunk into tolerable apathy.”