does not seem to have met his guardian again till January, 1805, when Augusta Byron writes to Hanson:
"I hear from Lady Gertrude Howard that Lord Carlisle was very much pleased with my brother, and I am sure, from what he said to me at Castle Howard, is disposed to show him all the kindness and attention in his power. I know you are so partial to Byron and so much interested in all that concerns him, that you will rejoice almost as much as I do that his acquaintance with Lord C. is renewed. In the mean time it is a great comfort for me to think that he has spent his Holydays so comfortably and so much to his wishes. You will easily believe that he is a very great favourite of mine, and I may add the more I see and hear of him, the more I must love and esteem him."
It may be doubted whether Carlisle ever saw the dedication of
Hours of Idleness
. Augusta Byron, in a letter to Hanson of February 7, 1807, says,
"I return you my Brother's poems with many Thanks. Mrs. B. has had the attention to send me 2 copies. I like some of them very much: but you will laugh when I tell you I have never had courage to shew them to Lord Carlisle for fear of his disapproving others."
The years 1806-7, spent at Southwell, as his sister says, "in idleness and ill humour with the whole World," were not the most creditable of Byron's life, and Carlisle's efforts to make him return to Cambridge failed. It is, moreover, certain that in 1809 Carlisle was ill; it is also probable that at a time when the scandal of Mary Anne Clarke and the Duke of York threatened to come before the House of Lords, he was unwilling to connect himself in public with a cousin of whom he knew no good, and of whose political views he was ignorant. These causes may have combined to produce the coldly formal letter, in which he told Byron the course of procedure to be adopted in taking his seat in the House of Lords, and ignored the young man's wish that his cousin and guardian should introduce him. (For Byron's attack upon Carlisle, and his subsequent admission of having done him "some wrong," see
English Bards, and Scotch Reviewers
, lines 723-740; and
Childe Harold