NEWSTEAD ABBEY

The remains of an Augustinian monastery founded by Henry II. in expiation of the murder of Thomas à Becket.

Newstead! fast-falling, once-resplendent dome!
Religion's shrine! repentant Henry's pride!

Of Warriors, Monks, and Dames the cloister'd tomb,
Whose pensive shades around thy ruins glide,

Hail to thy pile! more honour'd in thy fall
Than modern mansions in their pillar'd state;
Proudly majestic frowns thy vaulted hall,
Scowling defiance on the blasts of fate.

Elegy on Newstead Abbey-BYRON.

Scotland for ever, and, with her "ae son" and his nurse May Grey, travelled south to Newstead Abbey. We have no record of his first impressions when he drove past the lake and the cascade, and looked for the first time at the fountain which stood in front of the Abbey, and the "grand arch," the mighty window of the west front of the Priory Church. Children take most things for granted, but the "change from a shabby Scotch flat to a palace" was of a kind to excite the dullest and least emotional of "human boys"; and that Byron was unemotional is a point "unseized by the Germans yet." It was, no doubt, a moment of triumph, but it was soon over. In a few days or a few weeks he was despatched with his nurse into lodgings in the house of one Gill, who lived in St. James' Lane, Nottingham, and here he composed his first poem or satire on an elderly lady who had incurred his displeasure :

In Nottingham county there lives at Swan Green

As curst an old lady as ever was seen;

And when she does die,-which I hope will be soon,—
She firmly believes she will go to the moon.

Moore somewhat unkindly thought that it was "possible these rhymes may have been caught up at secondhand." Whoever "caught them up" did not catch them up securely. Swan Green is a bowdlerised form of "Swine Green," which is or was some kind of place or area about a quarter of a mile to the east of St. James' Lane. I am firmly convinced that Byron had

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