Upon it till it could not pass away;
He had no breath, nor being, but in hers,
She was his voice … upon a tone,
A touch of hers, his blood would ebb and flow,
And his cheek change tempestuously—his heart
Unknowing of its cause of agony.”
As a matter of fact, Miss Chaworth was two years older, and far more mature than he; she was gentle too, and possessed of a lady-like calm, which tortured him—since he could not break it down. Indeed, through all the time when he was sighing, she was looking over his head at Mr. Musters—who was bluff and hearty, and who rode to the hounds, and was an excellent type of the rollicking, self-satisfied, and beef-eating English squire—whom she married.
Early Verse and Marriage.
After this episode came Cambridge, and those Hours of Idleness which broke out into verse, and caught the scathing lash of Henry Brougham—then a young, but well-known, advocate, who was conspiring with Sydney Smith and Jeffrey (as I have told you) to renovate the world through the pages of the Edinburgh Review.
But this lashing brought a stinging reply; and the clever, shrewd, witty couplets of Byron’s satire upon the Scottish Reviewers (1809), convinced all scholarly readers that a new and very piquant pen had come to the making of English verse. Nor were Byron’s sentimentalisms of that day all so crude and ill-shapen as Brougham would have led the public to suppose. I quote a fragment from a little poem under date of 1808—he just twenty: