must have been familiar with every nook and corner of his heritage, for he had often stayed at Newstead as the guest of his tenant, Lord Grey de Ruthyn; but at last he had come to his own, a poor thing, and yet a great thing, and his very own. Ten had elapsed years since his predecessor, the "Wicked Lord," had breathed his last in the Prior's Lodgings, the one set of apartments which time and the weather and the bailiffs had left habitable. The first stanza of one of his first poems (1803), printed on the first page of Fugitive Pieces— "On leaving N-st-d"-is a lamentation over fallen greatness : Through the cracks in those battlements loud the winds whistle, For the hall of my fathers is gone to decay; And in yon once gay garden the hemlock and thistle Have chok'd up the rose, which once bloomed in the way. Again, in the Elegy on Newstead Abbey, which was written three years later, in 1806, he apostrophised the "hall of his fathers" as "Newstead's fast falling, once resplendent dome!" The "holy and beautiful house," which the Black Canons had dedicated to God and the Virgin, which his ancestor "little Sir John Byron with the great Beard" and his descendants had converted into a baronial mansion, was a dwelling-place for the owls and the bats. Something must have been done to make it habitable, or it could not have been let, and well let (1803-1808), as a shooting-box to Lord Grey de Ruthyn, but when it was handed over to Byron, he was forced to spend more money than he could afford in repairing and re-furnishing some of the smaller rooms for himself and his mother. A year later, when Childe Harold and his "fellow Bacchanals" masqueraded as Abbot and monks, and skylarked and "buffooned all round the house," neglect and decay still reigned supreme. The glory had departed, only the majesty and beauty remained. Newstead Abbey was built in the form of a hollow square. Flanking the hollow are cloisters supporting, on three sides, a range of corridors, once the cells of the monks, and on the fourth side is a library built or re-built in the sixteenth century. The hollow, or inner square, is a grassy quadrangle, and in the centre of the quadrangle stands a Gothic fountain, with a double ring or frill of gargoyles. If you stand by the fountain to examine the gargoyles, you look up to the windows of the corridors and library, and above the north-west corner of the cloisters you catch sight of the gable and crockets of the west front of the Priory Chapel. Byron's day the fountain stood in front of the house, but Colonel Wildman, who purchased the Abbey in 1817, restored it to its proper place, and Byron, in Don Juan (Canto xiii. St. lxv., February 1820) writes accordingly : Amidst the court a Gothic fountain played, Symmetrical, but decked with carvings quaint- And here perhaps a monster, there a saint. In Byron must have loved those gargoyles, and, it may be, |