No doubt there was some story connected with them. I suppose Mary Mace and Mary Beecher were play-fellows of the little girl, and that she had called her two white rabbits after them.

Near this house, but on the opposite side of the green, or rather of this corner of the green, is the house of Major Leacroft. This is the house where Byron used to join in private theatricals. The family which he was acquainted with is gone; the proprietor dead; and this Major Leacroft is another sort of man, a wealthy recluse, and collector of pictures.

In going from one place to another, we went round by the Greet, the stream in which Byron used to bathe, and where he dived for a lady's thimble, which he took from her work-box and threw in. The Greet is a mere brook, and for the most part so shallow that a man would much sooner crack his skull in it than dive very deep, unless it were above the mill, where the water is dammed up, or just below the mill-wheel by the bridge, but that is too public, being in the high road. Such is Southwell, in Nottinghamshire, which will always be livingly associated with one of the happiest periods of the life of Lord Byron.

Harrow being so near the metropolis, will naturally draw many visitors, as another of the happiest scenes of Byron's youthful life. Here he represents himself to have been eminently happy, and always looked back to this period of his youth with particular affection. The schoolroom where he studied, the tomb where he used to sit in the churchyard, and the spot where his natural daughter, Allegra, is buried, will always excite a lively interest. This tomb is still called by the boys at Harrow, "Byron's tomb," and its identity is very accurately fixed by himself in a letter to Mr. Murray, when giving direction for the interment of his daughter. "There is a spot in the churchyard, near the footpath, on the brow of the hill looking towards Windsor, and a tomb under a large tree, bearing the name of Peachie or Peachy, where I used to sit for hours and hours when a boy. This was my favourite spot; but as I wish to erect a tablet to her memory, the body had better be deposited in the church. Near the door on the left hand as you enter there is a monument, with a tablet containing these words:

'When Sorrow weeps o'er Virtue's sacred dust,
Our tears become us, and our grief is just:
Such were the tears she shed, who grateful pays
This last sad tribute of her love and praise.'

I recollect them after seventeen years, not from anything remarkable in them, but because from my seat in the gallery, I had generally my eyes turned towards that monument. As near as convenient I could wish Allegra to be buried, and on the wall a marble tablet placed, with these words :

In Memory of
Allegra,

Daughter of G. G. Lord Byron,
Who died at Bagna Cavallo,

In Italy, April 20th, 1822,
aged five years and three months.

'I shall go to her, but she shall not return to me.'

2nd Samuel, xii. 23."

These are interesting landmarks to the visitor, who will find the path to the tomb beneath the large elm well tracked, and the view there over the far stretching country, such as well might draw the musing eyes of the young poet. Captain Medwin says he saw the name of Byron "carved at Harrow, in three places, in very large characters-a presentiment of his future fame, or a pledge of his ambition to acquire it." The play-ground and cricket ground, will also be visited with equal interest. There we see in these a new and eager generation of fine lads at play, and then have a lively idea of what Byron and his cotemporaries were at that time-now no less than forty years ago. No one was a more thorough schoolboy, in all the enjoyment of play and youthful pranks, than Lord Byron, as he himself in verses addressed to one of his school-comrades shows us; and as all his schoolfellows testify of him.

"Yet when confinement's lingering hour was done,
Our sports, our studies, and our souls were one:
Together we impelled the flying ball,
Together waited in our tutor's hall;
Together joined in cricket's manly toil,
Or shared the produce of the river's spoil;
Or plunging from the green declining shore,
Our pliant limbs the buoyant waters bore:
In every element, unchanged, the same,
All, all that brothers should be, but the name."

But the whole of this poem, called Childish Recollections, published in the Hours of Idleness, is filled by the charms of recollected school delights at Harrow. Here his schoolfellows, amongst others, were Lord Clare, for whom through life he retained the warmest attachment, Lord Delaware, the Duke of Dorset, to whom he addressed one of his early poems, Colonel Wildman, who afterwards purchased Newstead, Lord Jocelyn, the Rev. William Harness, etc. He says, "P. Hunter, Curson, Long, Tattersall, were my principal friends. Clare, Dorset, Colonel Gordon, De Bath, Claridge, and John Wingfield, were my juniors and favourites." Last, and not least, Sir Robert Peel was his cotemporary, and it is now with very odd feelings that we read the anecdote in Byron's life, that when a great fellow of a boy-tyrant, who claimed little Peel as a fag, was giving him a castigation, Byron came and proposed to share it. "While the stripes were succeeding each other, and poor Peel writhing under them, Byron saw and felt for the misery of his friend; and although he knew that he was not strong enough to fight ✦✦✦✦✦✦ with any hope of success, and that it was dangerous even to approach him, he advanced to the scene of action, and with a blush of rage, tears in his eyes, and a voice trembling between terror and indignation, asked very humbly if ****** would be pleased to tell him how many stripes he meant to inflict?' -Why,' returned the executioner, you little rascal, what is that to you?'—' Because, if you please,' said Byron, holding out his arm, I would take half.'”

With Harrow, we take leave of the years of innocent boyhood. His removal to Cambridge, and his now long residences in London led him into those dissipations and sensualities which continued to cast a sad foil on the greater part of his after life. To Cambridge he never appeared much attached, and rather resided there occasionally as a necessity for taking his degree, than from any pleasure he had in the place. His rooms in Trinity College, Cambridge, are nearly the sole locality which will there attract the attention of the admirers of the poet, except the Commoners' hall, in which now the long tossed about statue of him by Thorwaldsen is about to be erected.

It was during his being a student of Cambridge, that Newstead abbey fell into his hands by the expiration of Lord Grey de

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Ruthyn's lease, and that he went thither, and repaired it to a certain extent, and furnished it at an expense far beyond his resources at the time. Here, with half a dozen of his fellowcollegians, amongst whom was the very clever, and early lost Charles Skinner Matthews, he spent a rackety time. He had got a set of monks' dresses from a masquerade warehouse in London, and in these they used to sit up all night, drinking and full of uproarious merriment. "Our hour of rising," says Mr. Matthews himself, was one. It was frequently past two before the breakfast party broke up. Then for the amusements of the morning, there was reading, fencing, single-stick, or shuttle-cock, in the great room; practising with the pistols in the hall; walking, riding, cricket, sailing on the lake, playing with the bear, or teasing the wolf. Between seven and eight we dined; and our evening lasted from that time till one, two, or three in the morning. The evening's diversions may easily be conceived. I must not omit the custom of handing round, after dinner, on the removal of the cloth, a human skull, filled with burgundy. After revelling on choice viands and the finest wines of France, we adjourned to tea, where we amused ourselves with reading, or improving conversation, each according to his fancy; and after sandwiches, etc. retired to rest."

It may well be imagined what a scandal this occasioned in the neighbourhood. During this time, there were still workpeople employed in the repairs of the house, and I recollect a master plasterer, who at the same time was doing work for my father a dozen miles off, relating to our astonishment the goings on of these gay roisterers. Byron himself says, that

"Where Superstition once had made her den,

Now Paphian girls were known to sing and smile."

And the person here referred to, particularly mentioned one young damsel dressed in boy's clothes that Byron had there, no doubt the same who about the same time lived with him at Brompton, and used to ride about on horseback with him at Brighton. Here at this time his dog Boatswain died, and had the well-known tomb raised for him in the garden where the poet himself proposed to lie. Here he employed himself with writing his scarifying English Bards and Scotch Reviewers,

which appeared about the time that he came of age, and so amply avenged him of the Edinburgh reviewers. Being, as he informs us, about ten thousand pounds in debt, he left his mother in possession of Newstead and set out on his foreign tour. In two years he returned to England, not only triumphant by the great popularity of his satire over all his enemies, but having in his portfolio the two first cantos of his inimitable Childe Harold. From this moment he was the most celebrated man of his age, and that at the age of twenty-four. At one spring he ascended above Walter Scott with all his well-earned honours. From the most solitary and friendless, because unconnected man of his rank, living about town in clubs and lodgings, for his few college friends were scattered abroad in the world, he became at once the great lion of all circles. Lord Holland, Rogers, Moore, etc. were his friends. He was besieged on all sides by aristocratic blue-stockings and givers of great parties. His life was for four or five years that of the most perfect Circean intoxication of worship and dissipation; yet during this period he poured out the Giaour, the Bride of Abydos, the Corsair, and Lara, poems of great vigour and beauty, and new in scene and spirit, but by no means reaching that height of poetical wealth and glory which he afterwards mounted to. Then came his ill-starred marriage, and in one short year his utter and lasting separation from his wife. This unfortunate marriage, against which he was strenuously warned by his most experienced friends, became the blight of his whole life. To the last he persisted in protesting that he never knew the cause of his wife's withdrawal from him; but Lady Byron, in a paper addressed to his biographer since his decease, has assigned as the reason that she believed him insane, or if not insane, not safe to live with. No wonder that his excitable temperament was lashed to a pitch of frenzy little short of madness, when such were his pecuniary embarrassments that in the one year of his living with his wife, nine executions were levied on his goods, his rank only saving him from a prison. It is easy to perceive the effect of this on the proud and sensitive mind of Lord Byron; and when the hand that should have soothed him was coolly withdrawn from him on the occasion, the finish was put to mortal endurance. Banished as it were by the abhorrence of his country, of that country which, from