“His legendary song could tell
    Of ancient deeds, so long forgot;
    Of feuds, whose memory was not;
    Of forests, now laid waste and bare;
    Of towers, which harbour now the hare;
    Of manners, long since chang’d and gone;
    Of chiefs, who under their grey stone
    So long had slept, that fickle Fame
    Had blotted from her rolls their name,
    And twin’d round some new minion’s head
    The fading wreath for which they bled."*

    Lay of the Last Minstrel.

Chapter LXXIX BYRON—­“CHILDE HAROLD’S PILGRIMAGE”

WHEN Sir Walter Scott ceased to write Metrical Romances, he said it was because Byron had beaten him.  But the metrical romances of these two poets are widely different.  With Sir Walter we are up among the hills, out on the wide moorland.  With him we tramp the heather, and ford the rushing streams; his poems are full of healthy, generous life.  With Byron we seem rather to be in the close air of a theater.  His poems do not tell of a rough and vigorous life, but of luxury and softness; of tyrants and slaves, of beautiful houris and dreadful villains.  And in the villains we always seem to see Byron himself, who tries to impress us with the fact that he is indeed a very “bold, bad man.”  In his poetry there is something artificial, which takes us backward to the time of Pope, rather than forward with the nature poets.

The boyhood of George Gordon Byron was a sad one.  He came of an ancient and noble family, but one which in its later generations had become feeble almost to madness.  His father, who was called Mad Jack, was wild and worthless, his mother was a wealthy woman, but weak and passionate, and in a short time after her marriage her husband spent nearly all her money.  Mrs. Byron then took her little baby and went to live quietly in Aberdeen on what was left of her fortune.

She was a weak and passionate woman, and sometimes she petted and spoiled her little boy, sometimes she treated him cruelly, calling him “a lame brat,” than which nothing could hurt him more, for poor little George was born lame, and all his life long he felt sore and angry about it.  To him too had been given the passionate temper of both father and mother, and when he was angry he would fall into “silent rages,” bite pieces out of saucers, or tear his pinafores to bits.

Meanwhile, while in Aberdeen Mrs. Byron struggled to live on 130 pounds a year, in Newstead Abbey, near Nottingham, there lived a queer, half-mad, old grand-uncle, who had earned for himself the name of “the wicked lord.”  He knew well enough that when he died the little boy in Aberdeen, with the pretty face and lame foot, would become Lord Byron.  He might have taken some interest in his nephew, and seen at least that he was sent to school, and given an education to fit him for his future place in the world.  But that was not “the wicked lord’s” way.  He paid no attention to the little boy in Aberdeen.  Indeed, it is said that he hated him, and that he cut down his trees and despoiled Newstead as much as he could, in order to leave his heir as poor a heritage as possible.