First on the list of early loves comes little Mary Duff of Aberdeen. She was one of Byron’s Scotch cousins, though a very distant one; and there is hardly anything else to be said, except that he was a child and she was a child in their kingdom by the sea. Only no wind blew out of a cloud chilling her. Her mother made a second marriage—described by Byron as a “faux pas” because it was socially disadvantageous—and left the city; and the two children never met again.
It was of no importance, of course. They were only a little more than seven when they were separated. But Byron was proud of his precocity, and liked to recall it, and to wonder if any other lover had ever been equally precocious. “I have been thinking lately a good deal of Mary Duff,” he wrote in a fragment of a diary at the age of twenty-five; and he reminded himself how he used to lie awake, picturing her, and how he urged his nurse to write her a love letter on his behalf, and how they sat together—“gravely making love in our way”—while Mary expressed pity for her younger sister Helen, for not having an admirer too. Above all, he reminded himself of the shock which he felt, years afterwards, when the sudden communication of a piece of news revived the recollection of the idyll.
“My mother,” he proceeded, “used always to rally me about this childish amour; and, at last, many years after, when I was sixteen, she told me, one day, ‘Oh, Byron, I have had a letter from Edinburgh, from Miss Abercromby, and your old sweetheart Mary Duff is married to a Mr. C——.’ And what was my answer? I really cannot explain or account for my feelings at that moment; but they nearly threw me into convulsions, and alarmed my mother so much that, after I grew better, she generally avoided the subject—to me—and contented herself with telling it to all her acquaintance.”
And then again:
“My misery, my love for that girl were so violent that I sometimes doubt if I have ever been really attached since. Be that as it may, hearing of her marriage several years after was like a thunder stroke—it nearly choked me—to the horror of my mother and the astonishment and almost incredulity of nearly everybody.”
It is a well-known story, and one can add nothing to it beyond the fact that Mary Duff’s husband was Mr. Cockburn, the wine merchant, and that she lived quite happily with him, and that we are entitled to think of her whenever we drink a glass of Cockburn’s port. But we may also doubt, perhaps, whether Byron is, in this case, quite a faithful reporter of his own emotions, and whether his grief was not artistically blended with other and later regrets, and other and later perceptions of the fickleness of the female heart and the mutability of human things. For when we come to look at the dates, we find that the date of Mary Duff’s marriage was also the date of Byron’s desperate passion for Mary Chaworth.
Between Mary Duff and Mary Chaworth, however, Margaret Parker had intervened. She was another cousin, descended from Admiral Byron’s daughter Augusta. The first letter that Byron ever wrote was addressed to her mother. “Dear Madam,” it began, “My Mamma being unable to write herself desires I will let you know that the potatoes are now ready and you are welcome to them whenever you please.” For the rest, one can only quote Byron’s brief reminiscence:
“My first dash into poetry was as early as 1800. It was the ebullition of a passion for my first cousin Margaret Parker, one of the most beautiful of evanescent beings. I have long forgotten the verses, but it would be difficult for me to forget her—her dark eyes—her long eyelashes—her completely Greek cast of face and figure! I was then about twelve—she rather older, perhaps a year. She died about a year or two afterwards in consequence of a fall which injured her spine and induced consumption.... My sister told me that, when she went to see her, shortly before her death, upon accidentally mentioning my name, Margaret coloured through the paleness of mortality to the eyes.... I knew nothing of her illness, being at Harrow and in the country, till she was gone. Some years after I made an attempt at an elegy—a very dull one.”
And then Byron speaks of his cousin’s “transparent” beauty—“she looked as if she had been made out of a rainbow”—and concludes:
“My passion had its usual effect upon me—I could not eat—I could not sleep—I could not rest; and although I had reason to know that she loved me, it was the texture of my life to think of the time that must elapse before we could meet again, being usually about twelve hours of separation! But I was a fool then, and am not much wiser now.”