stand by them; but he toys with convictions; studies the weakness, as he does the power, of those with him or against him; shifts his ground accordingly; rarely lacking poise, and the attitude of seeming steadfastness; whipping with his scourge of a tongue the little lapses of his adversaries till they shrill all over the kingdom; and putting his own triumphs - great or small — into such scenic combination, with such beat of drum, and blare of trumpet, as to make all England break out into bravos. * There was not that literary quality in his books, either early or late, which will give to them, I think, a very long life; but there was in the man a quality of shrewdness and of power which will be long remembered― perhaps not always to his honor.

I do not yield to any in admiration for the noble and philanthropic qualities which belong to the venerable, retired statesman of Hawarden; yet I

* In illustration of his comparatively humble position early, Greville in his later Journal, Chapter XXIV., speaks of Disraeli's once proposing to Moxon, the publisher, to take him (Disraeli) into partnership; Greville says Moxon told him

this.

cannot help thinking that if such a firm and audacious executive hand as belonged to Lord Beacons

field, had in the season of General Gordon's stress at Khartoum - controlled the fleets and armies of Great Britain, there would have been quite other outcome to the sad imbroglio in the Soudan. When war is afoot, the apostles of peace are the poorest of directors.

I go back for a moment to that Blessington Salon in order to close her story. There was a narrowed income-a failure of her jointure -a shortening of her book sales; but, notwithstanding, there was a long struggle to keep that brilliant little court alive. One grows to like so much the music and the fêtes and the glitter of the chandeliers, and the unction of flattering voices! But at last the ruin came; on a sudden the sheriffs were there; and clerks with their inventories in place of the "Tokens" and "annuals"-with their gorgeous engravings by Finden & Heath-which the Mistress had exploited; and she hurried off-after the elegant D'Orsay to Paris, hoping to rehabilitate herself, on the Champs Elysées, under the wing of Louis

LORD BYRON.

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Napoleon, just elected President. I chanced to see her in her coupé there, on a bright afternoon early in 1849 with elegant silken wraps about her and a shimmer of the old kindly smile upon her shrunken face-dashing out to the Bois; but within three months there was another sharp change; she dead, and her pretty decolleté court at an end forever.

The Poet of Newstead.

The reminiscences and conversations of Lord Byron, which we have at the hands of Lady Blessington, belong to a time, of course, much earlier than her series of London triumphs, and date with her journeys in Italy. A score of years at least before ever the chandeliers of her Irish ladyship were lighted in Gore House, Byron * had

*George Noel Gordon (Lord Byron), b. (London) 1788; d. (Greece) 1824. Hours of Idleness, 1807; English Bards, etc., 1809; Childe Harold (2 cantos), 1812; Don Juan, 181924; Moore's Life, 1830; Trelawney, Recollections, etc., 1858. The first volume (Macmillan, 1897) has appeared of a new edition of Byron's works, with voluminous notes (in over-fine print) by William Ernest Henley. The editorial stand-point may be judged by this averment from the preface,—“ the sole

gone sailing away from England under a storm of wrath; and he never came back again. Indeed it is not a little extraordinary that one of the most typical of English poets, should-like Landor, with whom he had many traits in common - have passed so little of his active life on English ground. Like Landor, he loved England most when England was most behind him. Like Landor, he was gifted with such rare powers as belonged to few Englishmen of that generation. In Landor these powers, so far as they expressed themselves in literary form, were kept in check by the iron rulings of a scrupulous and exacting craftsmanship; while in Byron they broke all trammels, whether of craftsmanship or reason, and glowed and blazed the more by reason of their audacities. Both were prone to great tempests of wrath which gave to both furious joys, and, I think, as furious regrets.

English poet bred since Milton to live a master-influence in the world at large."

Another full edition of works, with editing by Earl of Lovelace (grandson of Byron), is announced as shortly to appear from the press of Murray in London, and of Scribners in New York.

NEWSTEAD ABBEY.

189

Byron came by his wrathfulness in good hereditary fashion as we shall find if we look back only a little way into the records of that Newstead family. Newstead Abbey (more properly Priory, the archæologists tell us) is the name of that great English home half a ruin associated with the early years of the poet, but never for much time or in any true sense a home of his own. It is some ten miles north of Nottingham, in an interesting country, where lay the old Sherwood Forest, with its traditions of Robin Hood; there is a lichened Gothic front which explains the Abbey name; there are great rambling corridors and halls; there is a velvety lawn, with the monument to "Boatswain," the poet's dog; but one who goes there with however much of Byronic reading in his or her mind. will not, I think, warm toward the locality; and the curious foot-traveller will incline to trudge away in a hunt for Annesley, and the "Antique Oratory."

Well, in that ancient home, toward the end of the last century, there lived, very much by himself, an old Lord Byron, who some thirty years before, in a fit of wild rage, had killed a neighbor